



































































































































































































































REMBRANDT 


GEMS OF ART 
























































































































































































































































































































































































































































































































































































































Painted 1640 


In the National Gall 


PORTRAIT OF HIMSELF 






















































































REMBRANDT 

1607" ~ 1669 



J. B. MANSON 


m 3 

FUNK8 WAG NALLS COMPANY 


NEW YORK 





MJg-ds 


Uniform with this Volume 

Greuze 

Reynolds 

Watts 


filFT 

PUBLISHER 


PRINTED IN GREAT BRITAIN 


PREFACE 


I N this little book an effort has been made to produce a 
blend of biography and art which might happily achieve 
that unknown quantity of being popular. Even when, as 
the case is with Rembrandt, the experiences of life dove-tailed 
in so admirably with the development of artistic genius, this is 
no easy matter; for one palate the mixture may be a little too 
bitter, another may find it a shade too sweet. But that the book 
may lead others, who have not yet had that incomparable 
pleasure, to a direct study of the works of the master, is the 
hope of the author. 

Neither is it easy, when so many books on Rembrandt have 
been read or consulted, to signalize any particular work as 
having been of special use. Every student of Rembrandt is 
indebted to the researches of Bode and De Groot, of Michel 
and of Scheltema, to mention but a few. Professor Baldwin 
Brown’s book encloses a mine of information in a compact 
form, while M. Auguste Breal has written a charmingly human 
narrative. I am particularly indebted to Sir Charles Holmes’s 
brilliant and lucid “Notes on the Art of Rembrandt,” not so 
much for information as for stimulus, and to Professor A. M. 
Hind’s study of Rembrandt’s etchings. 


J.B.M. 














CONTENTS 

CHAPTER PAGE 

I Introductory . i 

II Leyden : Youth and Development - 13 

III Amsterdam : Success - - - - 33 

IV “ The Night Watch ” : Failure 48 

V The Last Phase : Bankruptcy and Death 71 


Index 


93 





\ 







LIST OF PLATES 

IN COLOUR 


Philips Lucasz. Cover 


Painted c. 1635 


In the National Gallery 


Portrait of Himself - Frontispiece 


J A Man With a Cap - 

mm 

- 

PAGE 

5 

''The Woman Taken in Adultery - 

- 

- 

15 

Portrait of an Old Man 

- 

- 

25 

Hendrikje Stoffels - 

- 

- 

43 

The Burgomaster - 

- 

- 

53 

Portrait of an Old Lady 

- 

- 

63 

The Syndics of the Cloth Merchants’ Guild 

81 








REMBRANDT VAN RYN 

Chapter I : Introductory 


A LL great art is essentially simple. This is true of every 
work that has stood the test of time. It is particularly 
true of Rembrandt's work. The reason is that the 
true artist is concerned only with the expression of his inward 
vision in the most direct and most appropriate manner. He 
must discard everything that is not essential to the complete 
realization of the emotional impulse which he has to express in 
a tangible and concrete form. 

Very few artists have attained to this perfection; Rembrandt 
reached it absolutely in his last phase. One may say that the 
absence of simplicity is a proof in itself that the artist has not 
yet found the proper form of expression of his emotion. 

There is something radically wrong with the productions of 
many modern painters which cannot be understood without a 
good deal of explanation, and which, after a certain lapse of 
time, cease to convey anything even to their producers. It is 
not profundity but poverty of thought that such painters seek 
to hide beneath a complicated method of expression or publish 
with a boast of incomprehensibility. 

So many of the younger modern artists offer us ingenuity in 
the place of art; artifice in place of thought; perplexity in place 
of lucidity. The full mind takes the most direct way to rid 
itself of its content in a concrete form. 


2 


REMBRANDT VAN RYN 


Rembrandt’s greatness lies originally in his power of feeling 
things more deeply and more intensely than other people. It 
was not in the brilliant and original methods of his expression; 
those, fascinating as they are, were but means to an end. The 
virtue of any work of art is not to be found merely in its technical 
excellence, as is too commonly supposed; that is only the 
outward expression of the inward emotion, the artist’s intuition, 
and is inseparable from it. It will be observed how 
Rembrandt’s technical methods developed and became more 
original and more interesting as his vision became maturer and 
more intense. The extent of the spiritual expression of his 
latest years could not have been realized by the methods of his 
earlier periods. 

The happiness of it, the superb quality of Rembrandt’s 
perfected achievement, was due to the fortunate combination 
of his two wonderful gifts : unusual depth of feeling and a 
unique power of expressing it. 

The unity of conception and expression, to which he attained 
more perfectly than any other artist, did not come without 
effort. His days were laborious; his inquiry and exploration 
were incessant. With all his natural genius, he could not reach 
his consummation without endless endeavour. 

Of all the qualities of a painter, cleverness is the least admir¬ 
able and the most admired. The self-conscious or cultivated 
cleverness, evidence of which is to be seen on the walls of all 
modern exhibitions of pictures, becomes an end in itself 
instead of being directed—the legitimate business of painting— 
to the realization of a received impression. In the work of most 
painters who practise it, one need seek for nothing further, for 



INTRODUCTORY 


3 


invariably there is nothing. In Rembrandt’s work, although it 
is inevitable that one should delight in the cleverness of his 
drawings, cleverness is the quality which is least obvious. One 
detaches it, later, from the complete expression, but one is first 
impressed, carried away, overwhelmed by the immensity and 
profundity of his vision and his insight into Nature, and 
especially human nature. 

Rembrandt was the most human of all great painters. His 
life is inseparable from his art; he lived to paint, and he worked 
harder and more joyously than most painters; his life was made 
up of simple pleasures and instinct with warm-hearted sym¬ 
pathy. He was of humanity and genius all compact. He had 
great qualities, and the faults of them and all the frailties of 
human nature. 

I suppose that more nonsense has been talked and written 
about art than about anything else. Yet the matter is exceedingly 
simple; so simple as to be almost incapable of explanation. Art 
is merely the visible or tangible expression of intuition; it is the 
expression of an impression. It is the realization, in a concrete 
form, of the vision and feeling of an artist. The kind of subject 
has nothing to do with it, although the majority of people like 
pictures for their subject matter. The subject is simply the 
thing that has aroused the emotion of the artist, and without 
that emotion (feeling, inspiration, or intuition, whatever one 
may call it) there is no art. That is why pictures, which are 
admirable representations of nature in a photographic way, but 
in which the painter has expressed no emotion simply because 
he felt none, leave us cold after the first admiration of their 
skill. They take the eye and gain the price, and then disappear 



A MAN WITH A CAP 


Painted c. 1650 


In the National Gallery 












y •rsta'Kr 
SJaWttiistl 












































































































































4 


INTRODUCTORY 


7 


for ever, or remain—alas, too often !—as dead monuments to 
mediocrity on the walls of art galleries. 

Nor is art invention, for it is neither scientific nor intellectual, 
notwithstanding the doctrines of certain modern propagandists. 
It is, above all, individual. It is fundamentally unchanged 
through the ages. New aspects of life may predominate and 
new ways of looking at things and, with them, new methods of 
expression; but human emotion, the quintessence of art, 
remains the same. 

Rembrandt may or may not be the most fitting subject of 
hero-worship, but his life was never remote; his experiences 
were common to humanity, and his works—his painted visions 
—are peculiarly appropriate as an example of what art is. It is 
perhaps impossible to separate his life from his art; perhaps it 
never is possible; his art and life developed together. We see 
his youthful genius, his awakening powers; we see the influence 
of success : how, for a time, it kept him at a certain level, and 
finally we see the effect of sorrow and worldly failure, and how 
it liberated his spirit so that it soared, in his art, to heights that 
had not been previously attained. 

In the first half of his life one is aware of his pre-occupation 
with his material when his expression remained incomplete, 
and in his last years the fusion of the material with the spiritual, 
and the consequent complete freedom and perfection of 
expression. At every moment of his life, one may say, he was 
practising his art. Even when he was not actually painting or 
drawing or etching he was among his people, watching them, 
studying them, knowing them. 

All his pictures are portraits of human beings, of simple 

B 



8 


REMBRANDT VAN RYN 


separate persons, even when he painted the most far-fetched 
subjects or disguised his sitters in the Oriental flummery which 
he liked too well. Saul or Abraham or Jacob, whatever he 
called him, was really the old Jew round the corner, whom he 
knew to the depth of his being, and whose life in its pathos, 
simplicity, and complexity he revealed in so masterly a manner 
on his canvases; because it was always human emotion he 
sought to express. 

If there is drama in his paintings, it is always the drama 
inherent in the human soul—not an applied drama, a drama 
only in name; but mostly his works are sympathetic revelations 
of the unconscious pathos of human life. 

There is an inferior kind of painter (common to all ages) who 
disguises the emptiness of his own mind behind the preten¬ 
tiousness of his subject matter, and conceals the fact that the 
real life of every day has nothing to say to him, behind a bombast 
of pretention , classical or historical pretension. Rembrandt, 
like all the greatest painters, found his subjects in, and drew 
his inspiration from, the life which surrounded him and which 
he knew intimately. Even when dignified with titles taken from 
the Bible, his pictures were in essence paintings of everyday 
life in some aspect or other in the picturesque, if dirty, quarter 
of Amsterdam, where he spent the greater part of his life; 
lived and loved, suffered and died. 

And this is natural, if not inevitable, for greatness of art lies 
in the depth of the artist’s feeling, and what he knows best he. 
will feel most deeply. It does not lie in any trick of the brush 
or facility with the pencil, or in any ingenious system of 
chiaroscuro . 



INTRODUCTORY 


9 


The feeling expressed with varying intensity in all his work, 
reaching a height of poignancy in the drawing of “ Abraham 
Sacrificing Isaac,” a keenness of dramatic intensity in the 
drawing of “The Supper at Emmaus,” and a depth of 
sadness in the painting of “David Playing Before Saul,” was 
the expression of his own feeling and suffering; the record of 
his own spiritual experience. 

Rembrandt was essentially a rebel; that is to say, he was an 
independent spirit who refused to follow the example of his 
prosaic and conventional countrymen. His work was infused 
with his own powerful personality, and therefore stood out in 
striking contrast with the prevailing practice of painting of the 
time, which was, for the most part, an Italianized convention, 
and was neither national nor spontaneous, nor racy of the soil. 

The process of steady self-development, as followed by 
Rembrandt and all considerable artists, is a slow one, and his 
best work was produced after he was forty-five years old. 

Decorative painting, which had been brought to a superb 
state of perfection during the Italian Renaissance owing to the 
needs of the great Italian palaces and the patronage of the 
Italian princes, had fallen from its height chiefly owing to the 
lack of demand. Where it existed in a very modified form, and 
expressed itself, though in a degraded manner, in the large 
“Corporation” pictures so popular in the Dutch seventeenth 
century, it was strictly limited to the demands, and usually the 
bad taste, of its patrons. It was not a form of expression in 
which Rembrandt was ever at his best, notwithstanding the 
feeling of dramatic intensity he achieved in his great painting 
of “ The Night Watch.” 



10 


REMBRANDT VAN RYN 


In any case, the grand style is not the most fitting or most 
natural form of expression for an artist ; it imposes too 
many limitations and conditions, whereas the only limitations 
that should bind an artist are those imposed by his actual 
material and his own personality. It set the artist an exterior 
problem, when the only problem should have been that of 
expressing his own emotion. 

Rembrandt, throughout his life, was concerned entirely with 
the expression of his own feeling and vision. In that lay his 
strength, and from the strength of his personality, as much as 
from its weakness, came his final ruin in the worldly sense. 

He was the first of the moderns, and there is a very real 
kinship between his work and modern art; particularly close is 
his relationship to the French Romantic movement of the early 
nineteenth century, and especially to Delacroix. His work even 
now is modern in essence, presumably because the truths he 
expressed were eternal, and this despite the limited conven¬ 
tionality of his colour. He achieved his results by tone and 
modelling; colour with him was an added beauty, but it was 
restrained and artificial, and not the colour nor in the key of 
Nature. His use of colour was mainly decorative; he did not 
feel Nature through colour, as the modern Impressionists did. 
It was not an essential part of his expression. 

The contemplation of the panorama of Rembrandt’s life is 
very moving. The eager young student, gifted with genius, 
working at his art incessantly; his early success and prosperity 
his happy marriage and his wife’s premature death; his increas¬ 
ing fame ; his generosity and extravagance; his life with his 
, beloved Hendrickje; his great work, “The Night Watch,” 



INTRODUCTORY 


ii 


which helped to lead to his ruin through the displeasure its 
originality gave to his patrons; his bankruptcy and ruin; the 
death of Hendrickje and of his son Titus; and the final period 
of his loneliness and homelessness, during which he produced 
some of his greatest works—the greatest works in the world— 
make a story of intensely human interest and pathos. 

It is not the purpose of this book to present a critical examina¬ 
tion of Rembrandt’s work, to analyse, to number and to stow 
away, as so many dry documents, his vital living expressions of 
human thought and passion. It does not attempt to deal 
exhaustively, or even otherwise, with every phase of his enor¬ 
mous production. That, indeed, would be impossible within so 
small a compass, seeing that there are about five hundred of 
his paintings known, nearly three hundred etchings, and about 
a thousand drawings. It does not propose to tear to pieces the 
rose, petal by petal, in order to discover the secret of its beauty; 
nor does it seek to estimate his place in art nor his influence, so 
extensive and so subtle, on the work of other painters. All 
these things have been done, and admirably done, by many 
writers and experts, whose books are easily accessible to those 
who would pursue the matter further. 

It seeks simply to tell the story of his life in all its human 
richness and pathos, and to show, in doing so, how his pictures 
came to be painted; how they grew out of the circumstances of 
his existence and the impelling quickness of his feelings; in the 
hope that it may induce others to learn to look at his pictures, 
his etchings, and his drawings, as expressions of human feeling, 
essentially real and companionable, and not as things remote and 
and curious or beyond the comprehension of ordinary individuals. 



12 


REMBRANDT VAN RYN 


The majority of the illustrations are taken from pictures in 
the superb collection in the National Gallery, where they are 
easily available for direct study. They represent, however 
inadequately, the development of his painting from the year 
1634 to his great picture of “The Syndics of the Cloth Mer¬ 
chants’ Guild” of 1661-2—his crowning achievement. 




CHAPTER II 

Leyden : Youth and Development 


H E was a citizen of Leyden—of that Leyden with its 
windmills and towers set on the banks of the old 
Rhine, in a flat country of vast distances stretching 
far away to the sea, intersected with canals, with its ever- 
changing atmospheric effects—a country in which he wandered 
when tired of the city, and which he has made familiar to us in 
many etchings and drawings—of that Leyden recovering from 
the brutal effects of long war and the siege by the Spaniards in 
1574, and becoming second in importance only to Amsterdam, 
and just beginning to regain its ancient status as the intellectual 
centre of the Dutch country. 

Leyden, with its University and its distinguished professors 
—Scaliger, Lipsius, Arminius, Heinsius, and how many others— 
attracted to its hospitable doors students of all kinds and from 
many countries. At the beginning of the seventeenth century 
the menace of Spain had been broken, and the patriotic enthu¬ 
siasm awakened by the long struggle began to have its effects 
on Dutch art as on other branches of peaceful industry. 

In the midst of this reawakening activity Rembrandt Har- 
mensz van Ryn was born on July 15, 1606, in a house close by 
the old White Gate. Although there is no official record, the 
date is accepted on the authority of Orlers, a contemporary who 
had been burgomaster of Leyden. His father, Harmen Gerritsz, 
born at Leyden in 1565, was a miller; a careful man of some 

local importance; a fairly well-off man, who owned houses and 

13 



THE WOMAN TAKEN IN ADULTERY 


Painted 1644 


In the National Gallery 
































































































LEYDEN : YOUTH AND DEVELOPMENT 


i7 


a mill and property of some sort outside the town walls. He 
was a man of foresight, and had reserved for himself a grave in 
the Church of St. Peter, in Leyden. He had married Cornelia, 
the daughter of a baker, Willem van Zuytbrouck. They had 
nine children, of whom Rembrandt was the eighth. 

There are some etchings, mostly dated 1630, the year of his 
father’s death, which are supposed to be portraits of his father, 
mainly, apparently, on the authority of a portrait by Gerard 
Dou of the same subject, and the small portrait in The Hague 
of an anxious-looking man, painted about 1629, an d generally 
supposed to represent Rembrandt’s father. Whether it was 
really his father who sat for these portraits has been doubted, 
as the same man appears in later etchings, and also in works by 
Lievens and Van der Vliet. On the other hand, nothing would be 
more natural than for Rembrandt to draw his father at this 
period, as he drew and etched the portraits of other members 
of his family. 

His appearance is characteristic : curiously long-headed, bald, 
with a hooked nose, sharp ferrety eyes, large ears, and a 
scrubby beard; a cautious, anxious man, devoted to business 
and the acquisition of riches. He appears in the portraits, 
sometimes bare-headed, sometimes adorned with a fur cap or a 
more fantastic head-dress, according to the son’s fancy, and 
once in the same steel gorget in which the young artist painted 
himself in the charming portrait at The Hague Gallery. 

The mother’s appearance is even more familiar. Rembrandt’s 
first known etching, a portrait of her, is dated 1628—the same 
year as the little panel at The Hague, which is an admirable 
piece of characterization, an expression of shrewdness, modified 



i8 


REMBRANDT VAN RYN 


by a sort of indulgent humour. He evidently held her in great 
respect and affection. He painted and etched her always in 
ordinary dress, never decorating her with the fanciful semi- 
Oriental costumes which he made others of his family wear. 
It is clear that she was a person of great character, pious, 
shrewd, simple, and good-humoured, while capable of firmness 
and severity when necessary. 

Rembrandt inherited his extraordinary capacity for work 
from both his parents; and probably as a child he received his 
first lessons from his mother and his familiarity with the Bible 
from her early teaching. The faces of his eldest brother, 
Adriaen—a miller, like the father—who appears in some of the 
later pictures, and his only sister, Lysbeth, are also known to us. 

Rembrandt’s parents appear at first to have decided that their 
son should be a scholar. Whether there was any particular 
reason why they should have chosen such a career for him 
cannot be known. He was not, at any time, fond of learning or 
even reading. An inventory made in 1656 showed that he 
possessed only fifteen books, besides an old Bible; the latter he 
certainly knew pretty thoroughly. As a boy, he must have been 
bright and intelligent, and his parents, being ambitious, pro¬ 
bably wished him to follow a career superior to their own 
trade, and the University would seem furthest removed from it. 

At any rate, he was sent, when quite young, to the Latin 
School with the idea of entering the University afterwards. His 
name was entered on the University books on May 20, 1620, 
when he was only fourteen years old. He does not seem to 
have greatly benefited by his studies, although he got a fair 
education; his heart and mind were in other things. 




LEYDEN : YOUTH AND DEVELOPMENT 19 


It is not difficult to imagine that the young student, with his 
keen interest in life and that passion for liberty which charac¬ 
terized him at all times, preferred to watch the life in the 
streets to attending dull classes. The life that surrounded him 
was essentially picturesque. Beggars of every description 
—cripples and men broken in war, in strange costumes and 
head-dresses—thronged the streets. Tradesmen, women hag¬ 
gling in the markets, the children, and the armed guard, all 
made up an ever-changing pageant of inexhaustible interest to 
the young artist, who was more than usually receptive. Duty 
in the class-rooms became extremely irksome. 

His parents, unlike so many parents, do not seem to have 
desired to thwart his ambition on realizing that it lay in the 
direction of art. They withdrew him from school and allowed 
him to follow the desires of his own heart. Art, in any case, 
was then held in high repute. Consideration of the riches and 
reputation won by Lucas van Leyden, whose paintings adorned 
the Town Hall, may have decided his parents to sacrifice their 
own inclinations and caused them to regard with favour the 
career of a painter for their son. In any case, they withdrew 
him from the school, and in 1620 placed him in the studio of 
Jacob van Swanenburch, who, so far as we know, was a thor¬ 
oughly commonplace painter. He, following what was the 
custom of the time (and, to some extent, still is), had lived and 
studied art in Italy to his own detriment. He had, however, 
good qualities as a man. He was kind and just, and did not 
make money out of his students. His influence on his pupil was 
probably negligible, although Rembrandt made rapid progress 
under his tuition. In a short time he had surpassed his master, 




20 


REMBRANDT VAN RYN 


as the latter was the first to recognize. Rembrandt remained 
with him for three years, that being the usual period of appren¬ 
ticeship. Leaving him, he went to Amsterdam in search of a 
more advanced master whose instruction could carry him a 
little farther along the road. 

There were not many masters to choose from at the time, 
even in Amsterdam. There was a group of minor painters who 
had acquired the academic manners of Italy. In landscape 
there were Van Goyen and Hercules Seghers, both of whom 
were thoroughly unpopular. In portraiture—which was a 
branch of art peculiarly popular with the Dutch, and which 
they practised on sound, if rather dull, lines—there were 
Ravestijn and Mierevelt, and Frans Hals, an outstanding 
and exceptional figure, was almost at the height of his 
fame. 

Rembrandt finally selected Pieter Lastman (1583-1633), a 
thoroughly Italianized Dutchman typical of his time. His 
artistic parents were Caravaggio and Elsheimer. He was a 
much more important figure than Swanenburch, and although 
a mediocre painter he was prominent among the artists in 
Amsterdam. In Rome he had acquired a knowledge of the 
academic rules of composition. He painted conventional 
pictures in crude colours, but it is interesting to note that in 
his work there was no trace of the dramatic use of chiaroscuro , 
so characteristic of Rembrandt’s work. He was a man of 
dull mind and artificial taste. 

Rembrandt entered Lastman’s studio, but it was not very 
long before he found that he had very little in common with 
his master. There was no sympathy between them, and 




LEYDEN : YOUTH AND DEVELOPMENT 


21 


Rembrandt, with his passion for real life, no doubt found his 
pictures, which were laboured and cold, intolerable. Routine 
—and especially school routine—was detestable to him, and he 
found his position as an apprentice living, more or less, in the 
house of a master—a master with whom he was dissatisfied— 
more of a hindrance than an aid to his development. 

It appears that he had no definite agreement with Lastman, 
or else Lastman was as pleased to see the last of him as 
Rembrandt was to be free again, for after six months he 
had left Amsterdam and was back in Leyden. 

It is doubtful if he got any particular good from Lastman, 
apart from experience; and experience of any sort is essential 
to an artist. He had not, anyhow, wasted much time. He 
acquired some of Lastman’s characteristics : a fondness for 
detailed compositions, a tightness of handling, which it took 
years to get rid of, and something of the Italianized convention 
From Lastman, too, he acquired a liking for Oriental finery and 
trivialities and other supposedly picturesque accessories. This 
latter taste may have been partly natural to him, as he never 
entirely outgrew it. 

He put this new fondness into operation immediately on his 
return to Leyden, and his early pictures show how he loved to 
dress up his sitters in costumes which were quite foreign to 
their natures and played no part in their lives. All his family, 
with the notable exception of his mother, had to submit to be 
dressed up for their portraits. These features, however, were 
never an essential part of his pictures; they were mere and 
useless accessories, but they could not obscure his depth of 
feeling—his passion for, and intense interest in, life. 



22 


REMBRANDT VAN RYN 


One thing he learnt during his stay in Amsterdam : that 
schools of art are useless to an artist of genius; at the best, they 
are a convenience—a place where a student can find a model; 
at the worst, a place where a student of mediocre talent can 
absorb the method of a master as blotting-paper mops up ink. 
Henceforth he determined, as Orlers has recorded, to study 
art by and for himself and in his own way. 

Now followed a period of incessant and absorbing study. 
Arnold Houbraken, who was a sort of Dutch Vasari, says he 
worked without ceasing in his father’s house as long as daylight 
lasted. When he was not indoors painting portraits and little 
pictures of subjects taken from the Bible he was out in the 
streets sketching the beggars, the markets, carts, wagons, 
animals—anything that took his fancy—or else he was wander¬ 
ing in the landscape outside the city walls drawing the river 
banks, trees and sheds and passing boats. 

Everywhere he was seeking for character and individuality. 
His immense capacity for work lasted throughout his life, from 
his student days, through the bright years of his prosperity 
and the days of his ruin, up to the day of his death. Of no other 
painter can it be so truly said that his art was his life. 

Besides portraits, mostly of his family, his paintings at this 
period were mainly of sacred subjects, such as it was cus¬ 
tomary for all young artists to try their hands at. He had for 
companion and fellow-student a youth about his own age, Jan 
Lievens (born in 1607), a gifted painter, with a rather facile 
talent and leanings towards the grand style. Lievens, who was 
the son of an embroiderer, was born in Leyden, and had been 
a fellow-student of Rembrandt’s in Pieter Lastman’s studio 



LEYDEN : YOUTH AND DEVELOPMENT 23 


(1617-19). They continued to work together at Leyden, and 
often painted the same subject. A certain old man with a white 
beard occurs in pictures painted by both the young artists. He 
is to be seen in pictures that Rembrandt painted at this period, 
such as “Lot and his Daughters’’ and “The Baptism of the 
Eunuch,” at the Louvre. _ 

At this time Rembrandt was naturally proceeding along more 
or less conventional lines, both in the choice of subject and the 
method of painting, although his work from the beginning had 
an unmistakably individual quality. But all the time he was 
struggling for expression, and gradually he began to forget the 
pictures he had seen and the methods he had grown up among, 
and to go direct to Nature for subjects and to find in them the 
method of expression. This growing freedom of mind; this 
constant communion with Nature, led to the complete develop¬ 
ment of his genius and to that quality of originality in his work 
which was really the expression of sincere and spontaneous 
impressions received direct from Nature. It was in the con¬ 
stancy and quality of his work in these precious impressionable 
years, never to be recaptured, that the foundations of his future 
greatness were laid. 

Some notes, first given to the world by Dr. J. A. Worp in 
1891, written between the years 1629 and 1631 by the Dutch 
statesman and poet, Constantine Huygens (1596-1687)—who 
was especially interested in art, which, as he tells us, his father 
wanted him to learn—give us some interesting information about 
this “noble pair of youths of Leyden.” He foretells their 
future greatness and expresses his astonishment that youths of 
such humble origin, one the son of a miller, the other of an 





PORTRAIT OF AN OLD MAN 


Painted 1659 


In the National Gallery 





























































































































































































































































































































































LEYDEN : YOUTH AND DEVELOPMENT 27 


embroiderer, should possess such remarkable gifts, especially 
as their teachers were so insignificant. 

“Rembrandt/’ he writes, “surpasses Lievens in taste and in 
quick sensibility, but is inferior to him in sublimity of invention 
and a certain audacity in ideas and forms.” “Lievens rather 
exaggerates the grandeur of the forms he has before his eyes 
than merely equals it, while the other (Rembrandt), wrapping 
himself in his work, prefers to concentrate on a small picture 
and gives in little an effect that on the vast canvases of others 
you look for in vain. . . In historical paintings, though Lievens 
is a consummate master, he will not easily equal the lively 
invention of his friend.” He goes on to complain that these 
“noble youths are so calmly satisfied that they hold Italy in 
small account, though they could visit it in a few months.” 
And this, he thinks, “is like a vein of madness in tempers so 
noble.” He dreams of the superb works they would create if 
only they were familiar with Raphael and Michael Angelo. 

Rembrandt’s reluctance to visit Italy was sound and instinc¬ 
tive. His realization of the danger of spending valuable youthful 
years in the study of Old Masters saved him, no doubt, from 
the fate which befell so many of the Dutch painters who fol¬ 
lowed the established custom of giving the finishing touches to 
their artistic education in Italy. They succumbed to forces too 
strong for them and became denationalized; their art developed 
into a hybrid production of classicism grafted on to a native 
homely realism. Fortunately; Rembrandt took an intensely 
personal view of his art. The need he felt for discover¬ 
ing a method entirely his own was his salvation. It led 
eventually to the establishment of Dutch national art on a 

c 



28 


REMBRANDT VAN 


secure foundation. In this way he developed to the full extent 
of his powers. 

It was about this time that he began to make a frequent 
practice of etching, an art which he brought to a state of perfec¬ 
tion, which may have been equalled, but has not been surpassed. 
In this he owed little to his predecessors, who had done nothing 
to explore its possibility or develop the real character of 
etching. It was still limited to the traditions of line en¬ 
graving. His earliest known etching is dated 1628. It is the 
small plate of his mother. The first portraits of himself also 
belong to this year. 

He had the love of things which is characteristic of most 
painters. His early works show that he had already started the 
collection of those “accessories”; rich materials, arms, armour, 
and jewellery, which later became a passion and the indulgence 
of which helped to contribute to his final ruin. Like the majority 
of artists, he started by painting “still life,” which is probably 
the obvious and best training. He kept up this practice through 
his life. As late as 1650 he etched “The Shell” with scrupulous 
care and minute detail. A “Still Life” by Rembrandt or a 
“Vanitas,” as it was called, was sold at Amsterdam for thirty- 
one florins on May 11, 1756. 

And now he received his first pupil. Gerard Dou, a painter, 
who became as famous as himself, went to him for instruction 
in 1628, at the age of fifteen. He remained with Rembrandt for 
three years, but whatever influence the latter had on his work 
was swamped in later years by the minute and trivial details 
which make Dou’s work so popular, and in which all sense of 
reality and vividness of impression is lost. 



LEYDEN : YOUTH AND DEVELOPMENT 


29 


During the next three years he had J. J. van der Vliet, the 
etcher, to assist him in his printing-room, fitted up with its 
presses, its bottles of acid, and stores of old paper. His output 
of etchings now became pretty considerable. He had a sure 
eye for the picturesque; there were subjects for his pencil, his 
brush, or his needle at any street corner; like all true painters, 
he found inspiration, as it is called, in the life that surrounded 
him. As Carlyle has said, “The poet can never have far to seek 
for a subject: the elements of his art are in him and around him 
on every hand; for him the Ideal world is not remote from the 
Actual, but under it and within it; nay, he is a poet, precisely 
because he can discern it there.” And so it emphatically was 
with Rembrandt. 

In 1630 he produced about thirty etchings, among which 
were the small plate of “The Presentation in the Temple,” the 
small “Christ disputing with the Doctors,” four portraits of his 
father, and eight or nine of himself. 

His earlier etchings may show a certain timidity in style, but 
the command of material revealed in that early etching of his 
mother in 1628 is remarkable. Its subtlety of modelling and 
delicacy of expression suggest that it could not have been his 
first essay in the medium. He had learnt to etch some time 
previously, when he was a pupil of Lastman, and he must have 
etched plates which were either lost or destroyed. 

Rembrandt’s fame had now extended far beyond his native 
town. Commissions for portraits and other pictures began to 
reach him from Amsterdam, and his journeys to the great city 
for the purpose of executing portraits became more and more 
frequent. It was gradually becoming the fashion to be painted 



30 


REMBRANDT VAN RYN 


by the great Rembrandt, and the calls upon his time necessi¬ 
tated his leaving Leyden to reside in Amsterdam. 

At some time during this period he must have made the 
acquaintance of Jacob Pinas, another of the Italianized painters. 
Arnold Houbraken (1660-1719) says that Rembrandt worked 
for some time under Pinas, whom some considered to have 
been his first master. At the time of his bankruptcy he possessed 
three pictures by Pinas, who undoubtedly had a great influence on 
him. Pinas had a fondness for brown chiaroscuro ; for those 
dramatic effects of light and shade which were characteristic 
of Rembrandt’s earlier work. Pinas certainly had used this 
effect before Rembrandt was painting, and people began to say, 
according to Houbraken, that Rembrandt imitated Pinas in 
this respect. In any case, it is a matter of little importance. 
Much has been said of Rembrandt’s use of extraordinary effects 
of light and shade. It was merely a convention, his own, by 
means of which he was able to work up to the most delicate, 
the most subtle shades of modelling. 

Rembrandt’s remarkable use of chiaroscuro has been spoken 
of as though it were the essence of his art. In itself it had no 
particular virtue; its value lay entirely in the use Rembrandt 
made of it as a means of expression. He certainly used it with 
wonderful effect, although he cannot be said to be the inventor 
of it. Velasquez and Leonardo were great masters of it. It 
dominated all painting until the French Impressionists intro¬ 
duced the use of a chiaroscuro of colour, about 1870, which has 
revolutionized the whole of modern art. 

Rembrandt’s first, or Leyden period as it is called, lasted until 
1631. After he left Lastman he had worked strenuously, 




LEYDEN : YOUTH AND DEVELOPMENT 


3 i 


painting from morning till night, in his own fashion. He was 
limited in the matter of models, although he pressed his family 
and friends into his service, and it was not until he settled in 
Amsterdam that he was able to study the nude. It took him 
many years to get rid of the tight handling and the smoothly 
finished surfaces which he had acquired at Lastman’s studio, 
and which were typical of most Dutch art. But his studies had 
been directed towards the expression of character and indivi¬ 
duality, and away from the conventional grace so much in 
favour with the Italianized Dutchmen. There is no evidence 
extant of his progress in painting previous to the year 1627, t0 
which his first dated pictures, “The Banker” in Berlin and 
“St. Paul in Prison” at Stuttgart, belong. 

He had, as we have noted, the capacity of finding his subjects 
in the life that surrounded him, which is characteristic of 
painters who are not academic. In this he was essentially 
modern. Art being the expression of an impression, it is 
natural that an artist should paint what he has seen and felt. 
Any composition conceived solely by the intellect or invented 
away from Nature itself, inevitably tends to become cold and 
formal, and leads to the danger of expressing types instead of 
individuals. 

This was a danger which certainly never threatened Rem¬ 
brandt. He studied everything and everywhere. The streets of 
Leyden were his happy hunting-ground. They swarmed with 
picturesque life of every description. Sketch-book in hand, he 
would spend whole days drawing the beggars and the passers-by, 
or else he would take them into his studio and make elaborate 
etchings of them. A series of such etchings, with a growing 




32 


REMBRANDT VAN RYN 


freedom of line and a stricter observation of character, belongs 
to the year 1630. There is nothing of romantic exaggeration in 
those etchings, but wonderful observation, sympathy, and 
insight. He frequently used himself as a model, and during the 
years 1630 and 1631 he produced about twenty self-portraits. 

He was also pre-occupied with sacred subjects at this period, 
such as “Judas bringing back the Price of his Betrayal,” “The 
Presentation in the Temple,” “Jesus among the Doctors,” 
“Saint Anastasius,” and many others. These works brought 
him celebrity as well as money. Commissions for portraits 
began to arrive from Amsterdam in increasing numbers, and 
he made up his mind—or, rather, it became necessary for him— 
to remove there altogether. He had already had connexions 
with the town. One of his friends was a picture dealer there, 
a man named Hendrick van Uylenburch, to whom he had 
already lent a sum of 1000 florins, which shows that he had 
already tasted of the fruits of prosperity. It was to Hendrick’s 
house that he went when he transferred his quarters to 
Amsterdam. 



CHAPTER III 
Amsterdam : Success 


B Y the end of 1631, Rembrandt had moved to Amsterdam. 
At first, he lived in the house of his friend Hendrick van 
Uylenburch. After some months he left and established 
his quarters in a warehouse by the Bloemgracht, in the west of 
the town. 

In Amsterdam, of course, with its multitudinous and varied 
life, he found many and greater things to interest. There were 
strange types, too, from all parts of the world. Here he was 
brought into closer contact with his fellow-artists and had 
greater facilities for work. 

For the first time, he was able to study the nude model 
systematically, his paintings of which have been so severely 
criticized. He has been accused of being coarse and debased— 
of degrading art. The criticism is ridiculous, showing a com¬ 
plete misconception of his art. The popular taste favoured the 
graceful conventions then in vogue, which were cold and life¬ 
less because they represented types instead of individuals. 
That Rembrandt should have painted women as he saw them, 
with all their individual characteristics and peculiarities, was 
an offence against what they considered good taste. It was not 
within their power to see the depth of feeling he expressed in 
his work or the solidity and suppleness, the quality and texture 
of living flesh he realized. His work in this direction was 
generally condemned. There were, it is true, times when he 
went astray and showed a want of the fitness of things, and 



34 


REMBRANDT VAN RYN 


even a lack of humour, as, for example, when he painted 
a realistic picture of a clumsy Dutch woman and called it 
‘ 4 Diana Bathing.” 

For the first year he was kept continually occupied with the 
portrait commissions which had brought him to Amsterdam. 
His portraits at this time were still strictly normal lines; they 
followed the accepted tradition of straightforward sincerity on 
sound, simple lines. He showed, indeed, a greater intensity of 
observation and a closer insight into character than most of his 
fellow-painters. But he was at this period the head of an 
accepted school of sound painters rather than an innovator or 
rebel. He had, however, this advantage : he brought to por¬ 
traiture a rich experience gained in painting historical and 
religious pictures which was uncommon. The value of this is 
rather well indicated in a letter written to me by Mr. J. S. 
Sargent, the celebrated portrait painter, in 1901, when referring 
to a student desiring to become a portrait painter. 

'‘The object of the student,” he writes, “should be to acquire 
sufficient command over his material to do whatever Nature 
presents to him. The conventionalities of portrait painting are 
only tolerable in one who is a good painter —if he is only a good 
portrait-painter he is nobody. Try to become a painter first, 
and then to apply your knowledge to a special branch; but do 
not begin by learning what is required for a special branch, or 
you will become a mannerist.” 

His work was a consistent advance in the right direction. He 
studied individual character with ever greater insight, acquiring 
greater freedom of handling and more daring methods of using 
pigment as his intuition became keener. Each new sitter 




AMSTERDAM : SUCCESS 


35 


presented a new problem, which he solved in his own way, 
gaining knowledge and experience by everything he did; even, 
or perhaps especially, by his failures. He never attempted to 
invent a comfortable and acceptable formula, like the majority 
of successful portrait painters. He was not attracted or misled 
by the virtuosity which was so popular, and which Frans Hals 
cultivated with so much success. 

In the early Amsterdam years his work was the best of its 
kind that was being done, but it was of a kind which, being 
familiar, was readily acceptable. He soon became the most 
popular exponent of Dutch art of his time. He was constantly 
employed. During the period from 1632 to 1634 he painted 
no fewer than fifty portraits. 

His portrait of an old lady with a ruff, said to be Franchise 
van Wasserhoven (in the National Gallery), painted in 1634, is 
typical of his work at this time. It still preserves the smooth 
surface qualities which were required of the painter. Its 
modelling is loose and without the grip and subtlety of the 
later portraits. Indeed, a comparison of this portrait with any 
of the portraits painted after 1650 is most illuminating, and 
shows the enormous strides in development he had yet to make. 
It is a wonderful study of character, like everything he painted, 
and the reflected half-lights on the right are beautifully expressed; 
but it is concerned with lesser things, such as would pre¬ 
occupy a mind smaller than Rembrandt's. There is a slight 
conflict in it between the momentary aspect and the essential 
soul of it. The heavy shadow by the right cheek or the 
white ruff is false, and an effective device unworthy of so 
great an artist. 



36 


REMBRANDT VAN RYN 


Nevertheless, in freedom of handling and actually in under¬ 
standing of character, this painting itself shows a definite 
advance on “The Anatomy Lesson/’ painted only two years 
earlier. This picture was his first attempt at a portrait group. 

Every important town possessed a theatre of anatomy, in 
which surgeons and professors of medicine lectured and 
demonstrated to their students and other medical men. There 
was such a lecture-hall in Leyden, which had been engraved 
by Swanenburch in 1610. The theatre at Amsterdam was 
already adorned by several pictures of anatomy lessons. 

In 1632, Dr. Tulp, a celebrated surgeon, who was the chief 
lecturer there, commissioned Rembrandt to paint a picture to 
be offered to the corporation of surgeons to commemorate his 
connexion with the school. There are a good many of such 
pictures in existence, as the one painted by Michiel Jansz 
Mierevelt in the hospital at Delft. This is somewhat marred, 
as was often the case, by the introduction of unpleasant and 
gruesome details. 

Rembrandt's picture is too well known to need much descrip¬ 
tion. It represents, as the chief figure, the surgeon, Nicholaes 
Pieterszoon Tulp, dissecting the forearm of a corpse in the 
presence of seven other doctors. It is a collection of portraits 
worked into a pictorial composition. Rembrandt has sought to 
present the scene in a natural way so that the figures shall not 
appear to be posed, and yet each figure shall be represented 
adequately as a complete portrait. In this he has not been 
entirely successful. It is interesting to note how he refused to 
be bound by any such limitation in his celebrated painting of 
“The Night Watch," painted ten years later. 



AMSTERDAM: SUCCESS 


37 


The figure of Dr. Tulp is admirable in pose and character. 
His whole attitude is that of a teacher. It is so realistically 
painted that the hands appear to move when one has gazed at 
it for a short time. This painting represents his greatest advance 
strictly along familiar and accepted lines. Although it was 
striking and effective, it was not in opposition to the accepted 
art of the time. He had not yet found that originality which 
awakens distrust; consequently, it was immensely popular. 

Among the early Amsterdam portraits was one painted in 
1632, representing a pretty fair-haired girl. This was Saskia, 
the youngest daughter of Rombertus van Uylenburch, a pros¬ 
perous lawyer from an old Frisian family, and a relative of 
Rembrandt’s friend Hendrick, the art dealer. She was born in 
1612 and became an orphan in 1624, when her father, a widower, 
died. She spent her time with various members of her family, 
and Rembrandt met her at the house of Jan Sylvius, the well- 
known preacher, whose portrait he etched in 1634, and who 
was married to one of her cousins. In 1632 she was betrothed 
to Rembrandt, and two years later they were married, on 
June 22. 

Saskia became his favourite model. He painted and etched 
her continually. Her pleasant face, with its fair hair, bright 
eyes, short and rather thick nose and double chin, is very 
familiar in the drawings, etchings, and paintings of this early 
period. She was the model for the “Betrothed Jewess” of 1632 
and the “Flora” of 1634. She played many different roles : 
that of the bride in “Samson’s Wedding Feast,” at Dresden, 
and “Susannah at the Bath,” in the Hague Gallery. 

In 1633 she appeared in armour as the goddess Bellona. 



REMBRANDT VAN RYN 


38 

A silver-point drawing at Berlin shows her wearing a broad- 
brimmed hat and carrying a flower in her hand. The drawing 
bears the inscription, “This is a portrait of my wife when she 
was 21 years old, three days after we were married, the 8th of 
June, 1633,” a date which is in conflict with that given in the 
register of the marriage. But Rembrandt was probably as 
unreliable about dates as he was about keeping accounts. Or 
the inscription may have been added by another hand. The 
well-known picture in Dresden, in which he is painted in the 
dress of a cavalier sitting by a well-furnished table, wineglass 
in hand, with the youthful Saskia on his knee, was painted in 
1634 or 1635. Whatever faults it may have as a picture—and 
some critics are of opinion that it shows a want of taste—it is 
certainly evidence of the happiness of his life at this time. 

A great deal of Saskia’s time must have been given up to 
posing for her husband, and at moments she must have felt 
that art claimed him as much as, or more than, she did; that he 
was sometimes more painter than man, more artist than lover. 
When he was at work he would scarcely stop to eat, and 
Houbraken has recorded that on such occasions he would be 
quite content with bread and cheese or a herring. Such habits 
must have been quite contrary to the training and instincts of 
a good Dutch housewife. 

By his incessant labours he certainly reached an intensity of 
feeling and a perfection of self-expression attained by few, if 
any other, artists, but it must, to some extent, have been at the 
cost of his life as a man and a husband. 

His success and popularity increased, and before very long 
he had become the fashion. Indeed, according to Houbraken, 





AMSTERDAM: SUCCESS 


39 


“one could please the public only by imitating him.” Scores of 
painters tried to adopt his style; they copied his subjects and 
the very costumes he used. 

His fame brought him pupils from various parts of Holland, 
and even from outside. Among the first to enter his studio were 
Ferdinand Bol, Govert Flinck, Van den Eeckhout, and Jan 
Victoors. Later on, Nicholaas Maes, Karel Fabritius, Philipe de 
Koninck, and Samuel van Hoogstraeten were the most famous 
of his pupils. Each pupil paid him about ioo florins a year. 
Besides this, the work they did for him in painting and etching 
added, according to his contemporary, Joachim von Sandrart, 
a sum of 2000 to 2500 florins. His pupils worked in cubicles 
divided off by partitions of canvas or paper. 

These were the happiest days of Rembrandt’s life. Saskia 
was a devoted wife; he painted all day, surrounded by his 
pupils; he could feel that he was universally appreciated. Yet 
he did not slacken or rest on his achievement or make his way 
easy by creating a formula out of the manner which had become 
so popular. With fame came wealth; he had his own earnings, 
and the money from his pupils, and Saskia brought him a 
fortune of 20,000 florins. His commissions seemed endless and 
were well paid, for the times. About 1637 he was getting 500 
florins for a portrait, and corporation pieces were paid for at 
the rate of 100 florins for each figure. His output of etchings 
was considerable, and these were in those days, as they are 
now, valued according to their states. The famous etching of 
“Christ with the Sick around Him, receiving Little Children,” 
done in 1649, usually known as the “100 Florin Plate,” gives 
an idea of the prices he might receive for an etching. 



40 


REMBRANDT VAN RYN 


With all these means he was able to indulge his passion for 
collecting. His house became a regular museum of precious 
stuffs, jewels, arms and armour, prints, casts, and pictures. He 
possessed some examples of the work of Adriaen Brouwer, an 
artist whom he particularly admired; and had eight landscapes 
by Hercules Seghers. In 1637 h e added to his collection a 
painting of “Hero and Leander,” by Rubens, which he bought 
for 424 florins. His method of buying at auction was certainly 
curious and unusual. He would start with such a high bid that 
no one else would enter into competition. He defended this 
custom by declaring that he did it to show his respect for art. 

In 1639, Constantin Huygens introduced him to the Stade- 
houder, Prince Frederick Henry, who gave him a commission 
to paint a series of Passion pictures for which he was to receive 
600 florins each. 

His reckless generosity and extravagance, his kindness to less 
fortunate artists, whose demands he never refused, were leading 
him into money difficulties, as his correspondence with the 
Stadehouder’s secretary, in which he presses for immediate 
payment for completed pictures, shows. He had already bor¬ 
rowed money on several occasions, and in 1639 h e wanted 
more for the purpose of buying a house. 

Since he first came to Amsterdam, he had moved from one 
dwelling-place to another, from the Bloemgracht to the street 
of the new doelen , thence to the Binnen Amstel. But now he 
felt the need of a house and studio of his own in which to 
store his collections and lodge his students. So in 1639 he was 
negotiating the purchase of a house at No. 4 Joden Breestraat, 
right in the midst of the Jewish quarter. This house, which 



AMSTERDAM: SUCCESS 


4i 


exists much as Rembrandt left it, was purchased for the public 
in 1906 and made into a Rembrandt Museum. 

The house had been built in 1606. The price of it was to be 
13,000 florins, which Rembrandt undertook to pay in instal¬ 
ments : 1200 florins on his entry, in May, 1639; 2050 florins 
within a year, and the remainder in five or six years, interest 
being added to the unpaid instalments. 

This transaction was the first cause leading to his ruin, so 
far as anything external can be said to have been the cause of it. 
In any case, it led, through a long series of unfortunate pro¬ 
ceedings, to his bankruptcy in 1656. The real cause, of course, 
lay within himself. He must have been extravagant to the verge 
of madness, for, besides the money he derived from other 
sources, his income, as estimated by Bode, amounted to some¬ 
thing between £5000 and £6000 a year during the first years 
of his residence in Amsterdam. He paid only a few instalments 
—actually, about 6000 florins in all—and, in spite of his con¬ 
siderable income, the money he got from Saskia, and the sum 
which came to him on his mother’s death in 1640, he was 
never able to pay more. He was, nevertheless, still able to add 
objects to his collection, for which he paid good prices, on one 
occasion giving 637 florins for a book of prints by Lucas van 
Leyden. 

An inventory was made in 1656, on his bankruptcy, of the 
furniture and other contents of his house. There was not 
much in the way of furniture : various chairs, tables, presses, 
and beds. The objects in his collection formed the bulk of the 
inventory : pictures, prints, drawings, casts, jewellery, cos¬ 
tumes, porcelain, glass, and musical instruments. The casts 




HENDRIKJE STOFFELS 


Painted 1651 


In the Scottish National Gallery, Edinburgh 







































































































































































































































































































































































































































































































































































































































































































































































































































































































































































































































































































































AMSTERDAM: SUCCESS 


45 


were mostly from the antique, and one was from Michael Angelo. 
There were also prints after a great many Italian painters. 

One of the first portraits painted in his new house was that 
of himself, in 1640, and now in the National Gallery. Accom¬ 
plished as this is, it is not one of his best works. It is admirably 
drawn and very delicately modelled, but it has a certain restraint, 
as though the very fact of painting himself imposed certain 
limitations; which, indeed, it probably did. Its main interest 
lies in the fact that it gives a real idea of the appearance of the 
painter. He was then in the days of his prosperity, as the rich¬ 
ness of his clothes indicates; but the face, while it is serene, 
with its shrewd clear eyes, is perturbed by a growing anxiety, 
and there is more than an indication of self-indulgence about 
the mouth. The painting is smooth; but it is a smoothness 
which is not sought for, as in the earlier portraits. The cool 
tones of the face are relieved by a sudden note of carnation, 
which is now almost startling, although that may not have been 
the case when it was first painted. 

The picture of “The Woman taken in Adultery,” in the 
National Gallery, although it belongs to a slightly later date 
(1644), may be taken as an example of his religious painting of 
this period. It marks a vast development from his earlier work 
in this direction. The picture is greatly superior to the “Simeon 
in the Temple,” at The Hague Gallery, painted in 1631. He 
had by this time freed himself from the grandiose conventional 
treatment of such subjects, which the Italians had made popular 
in Holland, and which he had acquired to some extent from 
Lastman. Rembrandt invested them with an intense feeling of 
humanity, which was an innovation, and not, at first, popular. 

D 




/ 


46 


REMBRANDT VAN RYN 


Against the vast spaciousness of the great Temple, the gloom 
of which is full of atmosphere and rich with subtle suggestion, 
Rembrandt has, in the picture of “The Woman taken in 
Adultery/’ posed the group at the top of some steps in the 
foreground. It is illuminated by a vivid ray of light falling 
from a window somewhere above. The figures are painted 
almost minutely, full of detail, and with the quality of the 
various materials beautifully rendered, yet the effect is broad 
and vigorous. The personages taking part in this event are no 
longer the philosophers and heroic types of the popular religious 
pictures, but human beings with human passions, human 
character and weaknesses. It is a real living scene, and not a 
mere illustration of an abstract idea. The posing of the figures 
is eloquent and indicative of the different lives and mental 
attitudes of the individuals who play their parts in the drama. 
The picture was painted for Jan Six, the patron and friend of 
Rembrandt. In 1657 it was valued at 1500 florins, which was 
considered a high price for the time. 

But Rembrandt was not superior to his fellow-painters only 
in the truth and variety of character in the individuals he 
painted and in the expressiveness and invention of his grouping; 
he was at the same time more artistic and more profound in his 
general truth to Nature. 

It is, however, not difficult to understand how his contem¬ 
poraries would regard this new attitude towards religious sub¬ 
jects with extreme disfavour as a degradation of religion. 
Rembrandt was getting beyond them and their limited outlook. 
His popularity was now on the decline—a decline which had its 
beginning in the painting of “The Night Watch” of 1642. 



AMSTERDAM: SUCCESS 


47 


It is interesting to contrast the picture of “The Woman taken 
in Adultery” with “The Adoration of the Shepherds,” also in 
the National Gallery. This latter picture was painted only four 
years later, in 1646, but it seems to mark a world of develop¬ 
ment from it. 

It is the beginning of Rembrandts last and greatest phase in 
which he achieved complete union of the real and the spiritual : 
a fusion which has been attained so absolutely by no other 
artist. In this picture he has not treated each figure as a 
separate individual, with every detail of his costume fully 
represented, as in the former picture; he has suppressed all 
truths but those which were most essential. Each figure is as 
much an individual in character; each is a simple separate 
person. One can tell from the painting the nature of the life 
of each person appearing in it, but the relationship each bears 
to the whole is much more intimate, much more profound; 
and the painting is much freer and more interesting. 

It is true that Rembrandt was influenced greatly by his moods 
and that he treated every subject in a different way—in its own 
way, as it were—and that each theme presented problems which 
required different solutions; but the difference between these 
two pictures is one of real development. Rembrandt had at 
last attained to that standard of artistic and spiritual quality 
which was his great achievement, and which characterized all 
his work after 1644 or thereabouts. 



CHAPTER IV 


The Night Watch : Failure 

T HE period from 1632 to 1642 was the most successful 
time of Rembrandt’s life. He had seen his pictures in 
demand everywhere; he had a great following of 
artists and pupils; he lived happily with Saskia; in short, he 
had tasted all the fruits of success. 

But this period was soon to come to an end, and from the 
heights he had reached he was to fall to corresponding depths. 
In almost every respect, save that of his art, he was to experi¬ 
ence the most bitter loss and disappointment. And through it 
all he continued to paint masterpieces, one greater than another. 
It was a triumph of spirit over matter. 

Already, during the latter part of his period of prosperity, he 
had begun to feel the pressure of money difficulties largely, as 
we have seen, through his own folly. That period had been 
marked by his two most important commissions, both of them 
for corporation pieces; a kind of work in which he was not at 
his best. 

“The Anatomy Lesson” brought him to Amsterdam in 1632* 
and led to his fame and success; “The Night Watch,” an 
infinitely greater picture, painted in 1642, during the height of 
his prosperity, marked the beginning of his decline in worldly 
fortune and reputation. 

The contrast between the two pictures is an obvious one, 
and has often been made. The one was then the most successful 
example of a work done on accepted lines, the other violated 

48 


THE NIGHT WATCH : FAILURE 


49 


convention, and by its originality brought him disrepute and 
the loss of worldly estimation. In the first case, he was the best 
exponent of an art which was popular; in the second, he had 
become a prophet, soon to be without honour. 

It was an irony of Fate—and yet easily understood, when one 
considers the invariable attitude of the public towards works of 
art which do not conform to accustomed styles—that Rembrandt 
should have reached fame by means of a comparatively com¬ 
monplace painting like “The Anatomy Lesson” and be led to 
ruin by an original masterpiece like “The Night Watch.” 

Most of the important towns of Holland possessed, at this 
time, civic guards or bands of militiamen. They were an out¬ 
come of the war with Spain, and were very popular with the 
people. There was considerable competition between the civic 
guards of different towns. 

The headquarters of the guards, the halls in which they met, 
were called doelen. The doelen were usually adorned with 
pictures representing portraits of the company. Each painting 
would represent a dozen or more figures, and the exigencies of 
such a composition imposed limitations which were intolerable 
to an artist of such a free and independent spirit as Rembrandt. 
In the case of “The Anatomy Lesson,” he had worked more or 
less successfully within the conditions imposed, but it was a 
very different matter in the case of “The Night Watch.” If 
public taste had stood still, Rembrandt himself had gone on; in 
the ten years his artistic development had been immense. He 
was no longer a young man of twenty-six, with a reputation to 
make. He was an established artist, universally recognized as 
a master, and it was impossible for him to submit to conven- 




5° 


REMBRANDT VAN RYN 


tional limitations, as Frans Hals had done with such success, 
as may be seen in the superb series of his pictures at Haarlem. 

It was the custom for each person represented in the group 
to contribute towards the sum paid to the artist. This, in 
itself, added many difficulties, for it is obvious that if each 
individual painted were to be satisfied the opportunities of the 
artist would be considerably circumscribed. In this case there 
were sixteen contributors to the sum of 1600 florins paid to 
Rembrandt, and of these only two were thoroughly satisfied. 

In Rembrandt’s day the picture was called “The Arming of 
the Guard”; its present and popular title is a misleading one, 
as it does not represent a night scene. For many years it could 
not be properly seen, and by the eighteenth century it was so 
darkened by dirt and many coats of varnish that Sir Joshua 
Reynolds, when he saw it, had much difficulty in persuading 
himself it was by Rembrandt. About this time it was first 
given the title of “The Night Watch,” probably because of its 
darkened condition. 

The picture was originally hung in the hall of the shooting 
company, for which it had been painted. In 1715 it was 
removed to the Town Hall, which is now the Palace at Amster¬ 
dam. On that occasion it was cut down on all four sides to 
make it fit a position between two doors. Two copies exist of 
the picture in its original state : the small oil-painting by Gerrit 
Lundens (born 1622), in the National Gallery, which was 
painted for Frans Banning Cocq about 1660, and a water¬ 
colour, in a private collection at The Hague, done for Banning 
Cocq’s family in 1655. The water-colour gives the exact title : 
“The young Lord of Purmerland (Banning Cocq) giving an 



THE NIGHT WATCH: FAILURE 


5i 


order to his Lieutenant, the Master of Vlaerdingen, for the 
company to march out.” 

About 1889 picture was cleaned and restored. It is now 
hung in a room specially built for it in the Rijks Museum at 
Amsterdam. It is placed so that it stands almost on the floor, 
and is seen by an admirably arranged side light, which is 
screened from the eyes of the spectator. 

The picture represents the civic guard, under its captain, 
Banning Cocq, about to march out from the doelen . The 
lighting of the picture is actually meant to be sunlight, which 
falls on the two figures in front; it is an attempt to reproduce 
the effect of light one gets in the porch of a church when a 
group of people emerges into sunshine, but the light and shade 
are so forced for purposes of dramatic effect that it cannot be 
said to be true to any natural effect; it has an atmosphere de 
tableau , and not the atmosphere of Nature. 

Of its vitality and vigour there can be no two opinions. 
Hoogstraeten, a pupil of Rembrandt’s, wrote an appreciation of 
it, in which he said that its vigour made other pictures look like 
painted cards, but he added that he wished the master had put 
more light in it. 

The picture has been discussed and criticized from every 
point of view. Fromentin, in his remarkable studies on the 
“Maitres d’autrefois,” did not hesitate to call it a failure. He 
attacked it as a whole and in detail; he found the handling 
“presque maladroite et tatonnante .” 

Many writers have been astonished at the presence in the 
picture of the charming young girl with the dead bird hanging 
from the girdle of her dress. The part she plays in the com- 



THE BURGOMASTER 


Painted c. 1661 


In the National Gallery 















































































































































































































































































































THE NIGHT WATCH: FAILURE 


55 


position seems obvious; she is dressed in yellow, somewhat like 
the lieutenant, whose figure she balances on the other side of 
the black figure of the captain. Her presence suggests that this 
company of militiamen is not at all warlike or terrible; it 
introduces an intimate note in the picture and gives it almost 
an air of festivity. 

The picture is original, powerful, and dramatic; it is the 
work of a master, although it is certainly not his chef d'oeuvre. 
In it, Rembrandt has pushed his mastery of chiaroscuro to an 
extreme for the sake of dramatic effectiveness. 

The shadows are forced almost to blackness and enfold 
the figures in mystery, with the exception of the captain 
and the lieutenant, while the young girl is illuminated by a 
sudden ray of light. The architectural background is lost in 
gloom. 

The painting is unequal; some parts, including the figure of 
the captain, have come easily, whilst others, and especially the 
white and gold lieutenant, are literally built up with paint; the 
painting of the latter figure has the wonderful quality of 
impasto, so characteristic of Rembrandt’s later work. 

The colour of the picture is warm dark brown, passing to a 
lighter golden brown, with diverse notes of local colour, such 
as the crimson sash across the captain’s breast; the blue and 
red of the banner; the green dress of the drummer, etc. There 
is an effective contrast between the stationary figures and those 
in movement. 

The artist has been concerned to carry out his conception 
without regard to any other considerations whatever. He has 
succeeded in expressing a remarkable dramatic moment full 



56 


REMBRANDT VAN RYN 


of vitality and movement. The result was, however, that both 
the sitters and the critics were displeased, with the exception of 
Captain Banning Cocq and the Lieutenant, the two prominent 
figures in the composition. The other sitters complained 
because they had not been given sufficient prominence; they 
had not received value for their money. The critics made fun 
of the black shadows. 

The picture was not in the tradition; it was strange and 
unusual; it was original; and when one compares it with the 
doelen pictures by Frans Hals and Van der Heist, which were the 
accepted convention for such things, and which were familiar 
to the public and the critics, one can easily imagine the shock 
given to them by “The Night Watch” and the indignation it 
aroused. Such things were not common to Holland in the 
seventeenth century. 

Michael Angelo's statue of “David” was stoned by the people 
of Florence, and, to come to more recent times, the Pre- 
Raphaelites, lately exhibited with such approval at the Tate 
Gallery, and competed for by collectors on the rare occasions 
when they appear at public auctions, were met with unbridled 
contempt for many years. The case of Whistler is still fresh in 
the memory of most people, and the French Impressionists, 
recently discovered in a state of high-priced rarity in Old Bond 
Street, were hailed as unparalleled imbeciles less than fifty 
years ago. Innovation in art, as, on a notable occasion, in 
religion, is almost a certain means of provoking public frenzy. 
Appreciation is rarer and less noisy. 

Rembrandt's popularity began quickly to wane. Commissions 
became less and less frequent as his money difficulties increased; 



THE NIGHT WATCH: FAILURE 


57 


and the master had other domestic troubles. Since 1639, 
Saskia’s health had been far from satisfactory, and now she was 
seriously ill. She had had two daughters, who died in infancy, 
which seems to indicate that there was something physically 
unsound in her constitution. There is an etching of a sick 
woman in a white head-dress, done in 1642, which is supposed 
to represent her shortly before her death. 

In 1641 her son Titus was born. He was more fortunate 
than the others, as he lived to the age of twenty-seven. He was 
some consolation and help in his father’s later life. 

Saskia was a pleasant, amiable woman, and during the eight 
years of their married life she had been a good friend and 
companion to Rembrandt. That she was on good terms with 
her husband is practically proved by the will which she made 
on June 5, 1642. She left all her property to Titus; her hus¬ 
band, Rembrandt van Ryn, until his re-marriage, or until his 
death if he did not marry again, to enjoy the use of her property, 
on condition of bringing up Titus honourably according to his 
condition and fortune. On Rembrandt’s death or re-marriage, 
half the property was to go to his heirs and half to Saskia’s 
sister Hiskia. And Rembrandt was to administer the estate 
without any interference on the part of the Board of Orphans. 
No inventory was made of her property—an omission which 
was the cause of some trouble in after years. 

Saskia died soon after this, and was buried in the old 
church of Amsterdam on June 19, 1642. Her death was the 
first of many blows to fall on Rembrandt at the time when 
he was least able to bear them. She had frequently sat to 
him. Indeed, an inspection of his etchings, drawings, and 




58 


REMBRANDT VAN RYN 


pictures would make us familiar with her appearance throughout 
the years of their life together. 

The paintings of her are much more important than the 
etchings, but they cannot be strictly relied on as portraits. 
For example, her hair, which was very characteristic, varies 
in them from light red to dark brown, and even the colour 
of her eyes changes; it is sometimes brown and some¬ 
times blue. 

The loss of his wife was a sad blow to Rembrandt. He 
endeavoured to console himself in his sorrow by plunging even 
deeper into work. During the period that followed he painted 
a great many religious pictures. 

We have already noticed two of the most important, “The 
Woman taken in Adultery,” of 1644, and “The Adoration of 
the Shepherds,” painted two years later. The fine picture of 
“The Sacrifice of Manoah,” at Dresden, belongs to a slightly 
earlier period, having been painted in 1641. It is a variation of, 
and an improvement on, the drawing which was a study for it. 
Other examples are the “Reconciliation of David and Absalom,” 
at Petrograd; which was in the Peterhoff—and may be now— 
the fine monochrome painting of “Christ taken down from 
the Cross,” in the National Gallery, both painted in 1642; 
the later “Susannah,” at Berlin, of 1647, with its imaginative 
Oriental landscape background. The titles of these could be 
easily multiplied, but a list of them would serve no purpose 
here. 

Overwhelmed with sorrow and troubled by other domestic 
matters, Rembrandt now sought refuge from the cares that 
assailed him on all sides by leaving the city. His life had 



THE NIGHT WATCH: FAILURE 


59 


become like a walled garden of sorrow, in which he cultivated 
his choicest blooms, but from which he could find no escape. 
His friend, Jan Six, coming to his rescue, offered him the 
hospitality of his country house near Hillegom, and thither 
Rembrandt retired at the close of 1642. 

Jan Six was a distinguished personality of the time, typical 
of the best class of cultivated amateurs. He belonged to an old 
Cambrai family, and had been born in 1618. He was a man of 
lively intelligence, deeply interested in art and literature. The 
splendid collection of pictures which he formed may still be 
seen, after some ceremony, at a private house in Amsterdam. 
He wrote poetry, and in 1648 he published a drama on the 
subject of ‘‘Medea,” for which, as a frontispiece, Rembrandt 
etched the plate known as “The Marriage of Jason and Creusa,” 
a rather diffuse design. 

During the course of his life, Six held several important 
public posts in Amsterdam, and eventually became burgomaster 
in 1691. Rembrandt’s celebrated etching of him, standing 
reading by an open window in his room, was done in 1647. 
Professor A. M. Hind describes it as “perhaps the most perfect 
achievement of tone by unaided etching which has ever been 
accomplished.” 

In the peace of the country, where he remained for two or 
three years, Rembrandt was able to forget his troubles in the 
interest of studying landscape. The sum total of his work 
includes very few paintings of landscapes—fewer, even, than 
those done in etching. He had painted landscape backgrounds 
to classical compositions, such as the “Rape of Proserpine,” in 
Berlin, and the “Rape of Europa,” both done about 1632, and 



6o 


REMBRANDT VAN RYN 


“Christ appearing to Mary Magdalen,” of 1638, in the Buck¬ 
ingham Palace collection. But of pure landscapes there are 
very few. The most important are the small Czartoryski 
wooded landscape under a cloudy sky, from which gleams of 
light fall on a river and trees; the “Landscape with a Ruin on 
a Hill” (at Cassel), a semi-classical, eclectic composition painted 
about 1646, which shows Rembrandt's lack of ease when paint¬ 
ing landscape. This, however, is not the case in his most famous 
landscape, “The Mill,” which belonged to Lord Lansdowne, 
and was exhibited at the Rembrandt Exhibition at Burlington 
House in 1899. This impressive picture, so simple and poetic, 
was painted about 1654, and was his latest painting of a land¬ 
scape. It was sold in 1911 for the immense sum of £100,000. 

Previous to 1640 he had not etched a single landscape, but 
now his sojourn at Jan Six's house gave him every opportunity. 

It has often been claimed that Rembrandt's work in landscape 
has not been adequately appreciated. It is very clear that it 
was not his proper metier ; nor did he ever study it profoundly 
enough to express himself completely in it. The forced con¬ 
trast of light and shade so effective in his portraits was intoler¬ 
ably artificial out of doors. His production in this direction 
was limited, one feels, from choice. He produced a fair number 
of etchings and drawings, the latter being especially admirable; 
in fact, in this medium his landscapes have never been surpassed 
for their wonderful depth of suggestion, obtained by a notable 
economy of means. 

His landscapes in oil are mostly rather late, when his remark¬ 
able power of selection and simplification was pretty well 
developed. Faced with the new and extraordinarily difficult 



THE NIGHT WATCH: FAILURE 


61 


problems which landscape-painting presented, he could solve 
them only by applying the knowledge he had gained in the 
studio. Instead of surrendering to landscape and learning what 
he could from the study of atmosphere and natural colour, he 
applied to it the exaggerated chiaroscuro which he used in his 
portraits and figure paintings. 

He approached landscape with a very decided parti-pris. 
This, of course, was not obvious or effective in his etched or 
drawn landscapes, where colour was not part of his medium of 
expression. With line and with tone he could realize a whole 
gamut of atmospheric expression, and in as completely artistic 
a manner as he achieved any portrait or interior study. And he 
got in his etched landscapes effects as dramatic and as intense 
as anything he produced in the other branches of art of which 
he was so consummate a master. But to apply to living land¬ 
scape, with its infinite variety and gradation of subtle and vital 
colour, the heavy shadows and violent contrast of light and 
shade which he had mastered in the studio, was to express, at 
once, obvious falsity and lack of conviction. 

If his landscapes in oil are to be regarded at all as high 
expressions of art they must be considered strictly as paintings, 
and not as landscapes; that is to say, not from the point of view 
of Nature. And, after all, Nature was his criterion. He con¬ 
stantly stated that one should follow only Nature, and obey no 
rules but hers. 

Landscape out of doors, en plein-air , is expressed, above all 
things, by light and air, and these things can be expressed 
profoundly and convincingly in paint only by colour-values; 
that is, by some attempt to achieve actual truth. 



PORTRAIT OF AN OLD LADY 


Painted c. 1634 


In the National Gallery 











>-v. 

' 1 










THE NIGHT WATCH: FAILURE 


65 


Rembrandt used only tone-values, and these in a forced way, 
which had no reference to a given natural effect; consequently, 
his painted landscapes, although they were infinitely suggestive 
and most interesting as paintings, were, and could be, only 
superficial—when they were not violently unreal—in regard to 
natural truth. 

Van Goyen (1596-1656), another Leyden artist, and the best 
of the earlier Dutch landscape painters, came much nearer to 
the truth; but, then, his attitude towards out-of-doors Nature 
was much simpler and sincerer than Rembrandt’s. He gave 
himself up humbly to the study of Nature in order to learn her 
secrets, whereas Rembrandt used her merely as subject-matter 
for the exercise of entirely pre-conceived methods and ideas. 
He had painted too long and too much in the studio, and had 
used too much a personal method, admirably adapted to studio 
work, to be able to approach Nature with a frank and open 
mind. His landscapes were infinitely more dramatic and, in 
their way, perhaps more intensely felt than Van Goyen’s 
humble and simple motifs , but in a real essential truth they 
were in a different and much lower category. 

One critic has written of the “broad expanse of luminous 
liquid air” in discussing the Cassel landscape—a particularly 
inappropriate example for such praise—but there is neither air 
nor luminosity without natural colour, and that “luminous 
liquid air” existed entirely in the imagination of the critic. 

In his drawings the matter is quite different; in a limited 
medium of which colour was not a part, he obtained an 
unrivalled power of concentrated expression. 

Rembrandt in landscape work has had a very limited influence 

E 



66 


REMBRANDT VAN RYN 


on other painters. The chief and most undoubted of his 
followers was Philip de Koninck (1619-88); the other followers 
were mainly third- and fourth-rate painters. The reason is 
fairly obvious; the artificiality of effect, which was a blemish in 
Rembrandt’s landscapes, and which was tolerable when used 
by Rembrandt, was easily imitated by men of inferior talent, in 
whose work it was detestable. They adopted his mannerisms 
and made them into a new school; thus making a virtue of his 
weaknesses. Moreover, the gradual trend of landscape was 
towards truth of natural effect until it culminated, after so 
many years, in French Impressionism. 

“The Mill” was a fine dramatic painting, and a great design, 
wonderfully simple and executed with consummate skill, but 
it is not to be regarded as a painting of Nature. 

It was circumstance rather than inclination that turned 
Rembrandt’s attention to landscape. Being comfortably situated 
in Jan Six’s house, it was natural that he should study his 
surroundings. He was always at work, and we have already 
observed his gift for finding subjects in the life immediately 
around him. The famous etching of “The Three Trees,” with 
its dramatic effect of the rainstorm clearing off to the left, was 
done at this time, in 1643. There is a fine sky effect in this 
etching, which is Rembrandt’s most serious study of clouds; 
the flat country stretching away into the distance in the left 
half of the plate is suggested with much subtlety. The beautiful 
“Omval” is two years later. The powerful and summary 
etching in outline known as “Six’s Bridge” belongs to the same 
year. There is a curious tale about this etching which may or 
may not be true. It is said that it was done against time as a 



THE NIGHT WATCH: FAILURE 


67 


wager, while the servant went to fetch mustard from a village 
near by. 

f§ During the next few years he painted several portraits and a 
few religious pictures. The portraits included that of his friend 
Dr. Ephraim Bonus (1642) and those of Nicholas Berchem, the 
painter, and his wife, painted in 1647. Among the religious 
pictures, of which the spiritual expression has been intensified 
by his sorrows, were the “Susannah and the Elders,'' in Berlin 
(1647), with its background of an Oriental garden scene, to 
which reference has already been made, and two versions of 
the “Supper at Emmaus," in 1648, which subject he had 
previously painted in 1629. 

Then came the Peace of Westphalia in 1648, and amid the 
general rejoicing arose a demand for pictures to commemorate 
it. But nobody thought of Rembrandt, who was now thoroughly 
unpopular. Everything went to his pupil Govert Flinck 
(1615-60) and to Van der Heist (1613-70), a showy and super¬ 
ficial painter, who had made a hit with his large pictures of 
civic guards. 

At this time Rembrandt produced the large romantic mono¬ 
chrome sketch of “The Concord of the State," which is in the 
Rotterdam Museum. It was crowded with figures and gave 
promise of a remarkable picture; but it did not find a purchaser, 
and remained in the artist's studio. 

In the country, Rembrandt had regained a certain peace of 
mind in the hospitable house of his friend Jan Six, but his 
domestic troubles were by no means at an end. At the time of 
his mother's death, Titus was only a few months old, and it 
was necessary to find someone to look after him. A widow 



68 


REMBRANDT VAN RYN 


named Geertgen Dircks was engaged as his nurse. She appear 
to have been a rather coarse person; not unkind, but of uncer¬ 
tain temper, and a strange mixture of greed and generosity. 
Naturally, her position in the household was an important one, 
and she obtained a certain dominion of Rembrandt and caused 
him a great deal of trouble. 

She appears to have been fond of her young charge, and in 
1648 she made a will leaving most of her property to Titus. 
Her violent temper led to frequent scenes with Rembrandt, 
and on one occasion she threatened to revoke her will. But 
some sort of agreement was arrived at in 1649, by which 
Rembrandt undertook to pay her a sum of 150 florins, and 
160 florins a year afterwards, while Geertgen was to make no 
further claim on him. But the peace was not permanent, for 
soon afterwards she brought an action against Rembrandt for 
breach of promise of marriage. She alleged that they had been 
on the terms of husband and wife. In the end the court ordered 
Rembrandt to pay her 200 florins a year for life. Shortly after, 
her mind became permanently deranged, and she was removed 
to an asylum at Gouda at Rembrandt’s expense. 

It was during the course of these troubles that we first hear 
of Hendrickje Stoffels, a charming country girl of twenty-three, 
who had been a witness in one of these disputes. She was in 
his service at the time, and was soon to become his friend and 
companion, and the chief consolation of his most difficult years. 

We seem to know her intimately through Rembrandt’s paint¬ 
ings of this period. She appears in many of his most beautiful 
pictures. She was a charming young person, of a fresh, warm¬ 
hearted personality, with real human sympathy. It was perhaps 




THE NIGHT WATCH: FAILURE 


69 


natural that her presence under his roof should lead to intimate 
relations. She became his mistress, and, as a result, was called 
before the Consistory of the Reformed Church of Amsterdam 
in 1654 and forbidden the Communion. 

There was an obstacle to their marriage in the clause of 
Saskia’s will by which Rembrandt would lose his interest in 
her estate if he married again, and by this time his financial 
situation had become desperately involved. 

Hendrickje is the “Young Girl at a Window,” in the Dulwich 
Gallery, a beautiful picture, but somewhat heavy in tone. She 
appears again in the charming picture, at Petrograd, of “The 
Holy Family,” painted in 1645. The picture has a flight of 
baby angels, quite foreign to his work, which were evidently 
adapted from Domenichino’s “Communion of St. Jerome.” 
There is a delightful intimate and homely charm about the 
picture, which is essentially human. One can understand, from 
it, the peace and happiness which Rembrandt, who was a home- 
loving man, must have found in her presence by his fireside. 

Contemplation of this picture with the pretty youthful figure 
of the mother, which was painted in 1645, and of other recog¬ 
nized paintings of the beautiful Hendrickje make it almost 
impossible that the painting in Edinburgh, reproduced here, 
can really represent Hendrickje as it is commonly supposed 
to do. It is dated 1651, when she was about twenty-four or 
twenty-five years old. The picture represents a coarse, heavy 
woman, nearer forty-five than twenty-five, and without any 
charm. It would be more appropriate as a portrait of the 
nurse Geertgen Dircks, who, however, in 1651 was in an 
asylum. In 1883 it was exhibited at the Royal Academy Winter 



70 


REMBRANDT VAN RYN 


Exhibition, by its then owner, Sir H. St. John Mildmay, as 
“A Female Portrait,” a more suitable title. But there are other 
instances of Rembrandt’s habit of making his portraits look 
older than his sitters. In the famous and masterly painting of 
Jan Six he has made him look like a man of sixty, when he was 
in reality only thirty-six. And in some of his own self-portraits 
he does not look his right age. 

Hendrickje was the model for the famous painting of “Bath- 
sheba,” in the Louvre, painted in 1654, the gem of his paintings 
of the nude, in which, though somewhat robust, she is still 
beautiful and sympathetic. She figures in the “Woman with 
Pearls,” of 1652, and the wonderful National Gallery picture 
of a “Woman Bathing,” painted in 1654. She is the subject of 
the golden “Portrait of a Girl,” in the Louvre, one of the most 
delightful portraits of her, and at a later date she appears with 
her daughter Cornelia in the “Venus and Love,” also in the 
Louvre. 



CHAPTER V 

The Last Phase : Bankruptcy and Death 

I F the death of Saskia seemed to close one period of Rem¬ 
brandt’s life, the appearance of Hendrickje marked the 
beginning of another : his last and most remarkable phase. 
He had come to Amsterdam, the hub of his universe, a 
young man full of enthusiasm, gifted beyond the usual, a 
passionate human nature, longing for freedom, hungry for 
experience. There, fame and success had welcomed him with 
open arms; he reached the heights of popularity. There he 
worked perhaps too much; there he lived perhaps with too 
little restraint. He knew a few happy years with Saskia. In 
some of his earlier self-portraits there is, perhaps, more than 
a hint of complacency. His artistic development through 
crowded years of labour had brought him to a pitch of original 
artistic effort consummated in “The Night Watch.” But he 
had grown beyond his public; his originality, newly attained, 
had meant the loss of his popularity; his work no longer flattered 
his admirers; he had dared to offer them work which they 
could not understand. He paid the inevitable penalty, as other 
artists have paid it before and since his day. 

Then came the death of Saskia, and with it a new experience 
of sorrow and loneliness. He was thrown back on to himself; 
he communed more deeply with his own nature. 

The withdrawal of that worldly success, of which he had 
drunk deeply—never an unmixed blessing for an artist—led 
him to find a profounder consolation in his art. Henceforth 

7 1 


72 


REMBRANDT VAN RYN 


spiritual expression found in it closer fusion with the material, 
with the result that in the last phase of his life he produced a 
succession of the finest works of art in painting that the world 
has ever seen. But during these years he was not, at first, 
without human consolation. His years with the devoted and 
warm-hearted Hendrickje, and the sensitive and responsive 
Titus, were the happiest in his life. In the sun of their affection 
his nature matured and ripened like a rare fruit. 

Despite the opinion of the world, Rembrandt now settled 
down to a congenial life, practically a married life with Hen¬ 
drickje. In her he found that sympathy and understanding 
which smoothed, if they did not altogether obliterate, the 
harshness of the world’s usage; and in which he could, by 
feeling contentedly himself, produce his best work unhampered 
by any mental or spiritual uneasiness. 

By 1661 the couple were openly regarded as a man and wife; 
a legal document of that year, unearthed by Dr. Bredius, 
relating to some trifling matter, refers to Hendrickje as 
“Madame Hendrickje Stoffels, wife of Sr. Rembrandt van 
Ryn, artist painter.” There is, however, no record that they 
were ever actually married. 

In 1654, Hendrickje gave birth to a daughter, whom Rem¬ 
brandt acknowledged and christened Cornelia, a name which 
had been given to the two daughters of Saskia who died in 
infancy. Hendrickje was a peasant, entirely without education 
—it is said that she could not even write—but she had 
other qualities which more than made up for any lack of 
culture. She was devoted to Titus, to whom she behaved as 
a second mother. 



THE LAST PHASE : BANKRUPTCY & DEATH 73 


Somewhere about this time, or a little earlier, Rembrandt 
painted the peculiarly interesting picture known as “The 
Painter’s Study,” which is in the Glasgow Art Gallery. In this 
the nude figure of Hendrickje is posed on a platform, while a 
man, said to be Rembrandt—although he does not particularly 
resemble him—is painting from her at an easel. 

During the sixteen-fifties also, he painted the attractive 
“Man in Armour” (at Glasgow), which is one of the most 
popular of his pictures. The delicacy and refinement of the 
features suggest that the model for this may have been Titus. 
It was once in the collection of Sir Joshua Reynolds. Admirable 
as the painting is, and beautifully as the armour is rendered, 
the picture does not belong in feeling to this period. He had 
long outgrown his fondness for dressing up his sitters, and was 
now content with simple humanity—with man unadorned. 

The portrait which is one of the earliest to mark the develop¬ 
ment of his final manner is the “Portrait of a Man,” at The 
Hague, painted in 1650, and now said to represent his elder 
brother, Adriaen Hamiensz van Ryn, born in 1597 or 1598, who 
became a miller after his father. He died some time between 
August, 1652, and April, 1653. This strong and rugged 
portrait is extremely simple. The modelling is expressed 
subtlely and strongly, with vigorous touches of paint put on 
with a full brush. 

This portrait makes an interesting contrast with “A Man with 
a Cap,” the picture in the National Gallery, reproduced on 
page 5. In this picture, painted about the same time, the light 
is concentrated on the left of the head, throwing the rest of the 
face into exaggerated shadow. The gain in dramatic effect is 



74 


REMBRANDT VAN RYN 


counter-balanced by the suggestion of forced unreality. The 
paint is more fluid and thinner than in the portrait of the 
brother. The exaggerated dark in the beard on the light side 
of the face is disquietening, and suggests a growth of unnatural 
blackness. These speculations come between one and the real 
significance of the picture. One is conscious of a device for 
obtaining an effect which is a little too obvious. 

Rembrandt had been fortunate in having excellent models in 
his own family. They all had to spend considerable time posing 
to him, and Titus had to play his part. Titus himself made 
some attempts to paint. The inventory drawn up in 1656 
rather pleasingly mentions a “Head of Mary,” “A Book,” and 
“Three little Dogs done from Nature,” the work of Titus. 

Titus appears as a charming figure; delicate and refined; an 
admirable type of model for Rembrandt's religious composi¬ 
tions. As the young Joseph, as the youthful Christ, and as 
Tobias he was admirable. He was Joseph in “Joseph and 
Potiphar's Wife,” at Petrograd, painted in 1655; he m the 
Louvre “Good Samaritan,” 1648, and in many other composi¬ 
tions, not to mention several exquisite portraits, such as the 
young and wistful portrait in Lord Spencer's collection, the 
delightful boy in Lord Crawford's picture, the Wallace Collec¬ 
tion picture, and as the young man in Sir George Holford's 
collection. 

Titus was a very loyal and affectionate character. Later on, 
as we shall see, he was a great consolation to his father. 

Rembrandt's financial troubles had, in the meantime, gone 
from bad to worse. Lack of money did not, however, prevent 
him from adding to his collections, or from dressing Hendrickje 



THE LAST PHASE : BANKRUPTCY & DEATH 75 


in expensive furs or decorating her with pearls and diamonds 
and enamelled bracelets. To make his purchases and to meet 
other demands which became increasingly pressing he began 
to borrow money from the usurers by whom, in the Jewish 
quarter, where his house was situated, he was surrounded. 

The house in the Breestraat, which stands as a monument 
to his greatness and his weakness, had been the initial 
cause of his money troubles, but the money he borrowed 
so freely did not go to pay off the arrears of purchase money 
or the interest on it. 

In 1653 the former owner began to press for payment of the 
money owing to him, now amounting to some 9000 florins. 
Rembrandt replied by demanding the title-deeds, but the owner 
obtained an order that Rembrandt must pay or leave the house. 
Among the many people from whom he borrowed money was 
his friend Jan Six, who advanced him the sum of 1000 florins, 
a transaction which later on led to the disruption of their 
friendship. Other creditors included Cornelis Witsen, a burgo¬ 
master of the town, and a certain Van Hertsbeek. These 
creditors also demanded payment, while Jan Six transferred 
his debt to Gerbrand Ornia, an act not entirely friendly to 
Rembrandt. 

Saskia’s family now intervened, ostensibly on behalf of Titus, 
but indirectly in the interests of the whole household, their 
object being to rescue as much of the property as possible as 
belonging to Saskia’s estate. 

Seeing the trend of events, they had previously demanded 
from Rembrandt, in 1647, a statement of his position. It was 
estimated that, in 1642, the property of himself and Saskia 



76 


REMBRANDT VAN RYN 


amounted to 40,750 florins; half of this would legally come to 
Titus, for whom a legal representative was now appointed. 
The ownership of the house in the Breestraat was made 
over to Titus. 

All this, however, could not delay the evil day, and in 1656 
Rembrandt was declared bankrupt. Two years later the house 
was sold by the liquidator for a sum of 11,218 florins, which 
was 1700 florins less than he gave for it. Some of the creditors 
were paid out of the proceeds, but one of them, Van Hertsbeek, 
was sued by Titus’s representative and compelled to disgorge. 
In the final settlement, which was not effected until 1665, 
Titus received 6952 florins as his share. 

His collections also were sold about this time, and with less 
satisfactory results. They consisted of pictures, many from his 
own hand, engravings and etchings, drawings, and various 
objects of art. All the precious things that he prized, and for 
which he had paid so dearly, fetched something less than 
5000 florins. But the greatest loss was his own paintings, 
drawings, and his etchings in their most prized ‘‘states.” These 
could not be replaced even by the devoted efforts of Titus and 
Hendrickje. 

Incessant as his labours had been, Rembrandt tried to 
redouble them as a way of meeting his embarrassments. In 
spite of his troubles and anxieties, he produced in the year 1656 
some of his finest etched portraits. The superb Arnold Tholinx, 
a mature and vital piece of characterization, was the chief of his 
portraits of that year. Impressions of the first state of this plate 
are so rare that one of them fetched more than £1500 in 1883. 
Two other plates were portraits of officials with whom he was 



THE LAST PHASE : BANKRUPTCY & DEATH 77 


brought into contact through his bankruptcy : Jacob Haaring, 
warden of the Debtors’ Prison, and Thomas Haaring, auctioneer 
of debtors’ effects. These two portraits, through their associa¬ 
tions, are silent witnesses of Rembrandt’s troubles; but it is 
characteristic of him that, harassed as he was, he should have 
turned circumstances to account and etched two of his finest 
portraits from the men who were charged with the unravelling 
of his tangled affairs. 

The portrait of Jacob Haaring, with its atmosphere of 
melancholy, has an expression of puzzled amazement, as though 
the sitter found Rembrandt a very curious person. 

The portrait of Jan Lutma, the goldsmith and sculptor, with 
its solidly modelled head, was etched in this year, as was also 
the portrait of Rembrandt’s friend, Abraham Francen, the art 
dealer, represented in an interior surrounded by works of art. 

But these were not the only results of his labours during this 
year of bankruptcy; his paintings included some notable pic¬ 
tures, such as the “Lesson in Anatomy by Doctor Deyman,” 
which was partly burnt in 1723. A fragment of it is preserved 
at Amsterdam. There were also religious compositions; the 
serene and wistful “Jacob blessing the Children of Joseph,” at 
Cassel; “The Denial of St. Peter,” with its subtle study of 
artificial light, at Petrograd; and “The Adoration of the Magi,” 
at Buckingham Palace. 

It is interesting to compare these pictures with the mono¬ 
chrome painting of “Christ before Pilate,” in the National 
Gallery. This was done about 1635 or 1636. It is an extra¬ 
ordinary expression of human emotion; but it has nothing of 
the dignity and serenity of these late religious paintings; as a 




78 


REMBRANDT VAN RYN 


representation of tiresome old men quarrelling it is very 
remarkable, but as a painting of its subject it is unsatisfactory. 
It shows the danger of Rembrandt’s very human and realistic 
treatment of such themes; a danger which was even more 
marked in his treatment of classical subjects when he made, on 
occasion, the clumsy nude figure of a rather coarse Dutch 
woman serve as “Diana Bathing.” It was always the real 
human thing that he painted, whatever title he might give the 
picture. In any case, the work he turned out was a splendid 
record for a year of such tribulation. 

For the next few years, until 1663, he was without any 
settled habitation. He wandered from one lodging-place to 
another. With no definite studio, utilizing any room that was 
available; without the Persian carpets and flowers in brass pots, 
so necessary to successful portrait painters; with eyesight 
beginning to fail, he painted some of his best works. 

The curious but extraordinary picture of “David playing the 
Harp before Saul” (at The Hague Gallery) was painted about 
this time. Rather unsatisfactory in composition—the two 
figures scarcely seem connected—and almost grotesque in some 
details, it is a haunting expression of sadness. The National 
Gallery possesses a superb collection of Rembrandt’s paintings 
of the latest period, from “The Woman Bathing,” of 1654, to 
the “Portrait of a Woman,” of 1666, which looks as though it 
had been painted at least ten years earlier. These pictures can 
be seen and studied at leisure by most of the readers of this 
book. In them Rembrandt’s art can be seen at its finest. 

Now he has reached that state of perfection in which vision 
or inspiration and the means of expressing it are completely 



THE LAST PHASE : BANKRUPTCY & DEATH 79 


united. It is as though his intuition expressed itself outwardly 
and visibly, without the intervention of any material means. 
And these later portraits are all different; each problem pre¬ 
sented is solved in its own way. And the refined, sensitive 
technique—how it responds to his perception in so many varied 
ways ! Compare “A Jewish Rabbi’’ (No. 190, at the National 
Gallery), painted about 1657, with its wonderful fluent touch, 
which reflects the slightest nuance of colour and the subtlest 
variation of modelling, with the strong and vital “Portrait of an 
Old Man” (No. 243, in the same gallery), painted in 1659. 

And what a glory of colour there is in all his late work ! His 
sense of colour is entirely personal; it seems to be the colour of 
his spiritual expression rather than the colour of Nature. He 
had throughout the development of his painting suppressed 
local colour in order to obtain his masterly concentration. He 
had used it decoratively as an adjunct, but now in the maturity 
of his art, it had become, as it were, the colour of the soul of 
his portraits. It floods with a glowing golden brown the 
“Portrait of a Burgomaster” (No. 1674, in the National Gallery), 
and bathes in rich and varied darkness the “Portrait of an 
Old Man.” 

Rembrandt had now attained perfect simplicity, but it had 
been reached only by constant work and incessant research. 
A member of the Institut de France, being asked what genius 
was, replied : “C’est de ne jamais connaitre la difficulte .” But 
all his life Rembrandt had known it, faced it, and overcome it. 
The path of his development had been long and stony. He 
was, like all considerable artists, practically self-taught. It is 
very doubtful whether he would have reached the same heights 



THE SYNDICS OF 
THE CLOTH MERCHANTS’ GUILD 

Painted 1661-2 In the Rijks Museum, Amsterdam 












I 


THE LAST PHASE : BANKRUPTCY & DEATH 83 


of pure expression if he had spent many years under a master 
at the most impressionable time of his life. 

The importance of an artist must depend, in the end, on his 
own personal message and the completeness of his expression 
of it. His training, his life, is devoted to learning the most 
appropriate way to deliver it. Obviously, self-training, in which 
the painter is groping incessantly within himself to find a 
personal manner of expression, is ultimately the soundest 
and produces the most permanent results. The fact that 
Rembrandt’s masterpieces were all produced in his maturity is 
not unusual. It is surely fitting that the perfect fruit should be 
the result of the various processes of natural growth. In 
Rembrandt’s case there was no final decay. He died when his 
art had reached its full perfection. 

While he was growing he had painted, with increasing power, 
the outward life of man; in his last phase, he painted the very 
soul. He had acquired such power that the act of painting had 
become almost instinctive or sub-conscious. 

Among the wonderful late portraits at the National Gallery, 
the “Portrait of an Old Man” and “A Burgomaster,” referred 
to already, serve to express two sides of Rembrandt’s mind. 
One might call them the concrete and the abstract for con¬ 
venience, although this would not be quite just. In the “Old 
Man” the head stands out of the enveloping darkness, illu¬ 
minated by a sudden light. It is intensely real; admirably 
modelled and most beautifully painted. It is built up with 
paint; every variation in modelling is expressed by a definite 
stroke of the brush. In spite of unreality of the effect of light 
and shade, it is instinct. One feels one knows the man 

F 



8 4 


REMBRANDT VAN RYN 


intimately; it is his character and soul that are painted on the 
canvas in the shape of this living head. “A Burgomaster” 
seems more like a dream; a vision embodied or scarcely 
embodied, and yet it is no less real than the “Old Man”; only 
the reality is kept farther back. It is more like an expression, 
a creation, of mature dignity and sadness and old wisdom than 
the painting of a man. And yet the man is there complete in 
his personality. The subdued harmony of old gold in this 
picture is like the colour of his personality. It is a revelation of 
the essential soul that lies at the heart of things. It was painted 
about 1661, or two years later than the “Old Man. 

Rembrandt’s late work has that quality which I have noticed 
about all good pictures : the quality of enticing you into itself, 
of inviting you to explore its mystery, to live with it, to know 
and love it. Bad pictures, on the other hand, are aggressive and 
brazen-faced; they shout their virtues at you like politicians 
during an election. 

“The Portrait of an Old Lady” (No. 1675, at the National 
Gallery), also painted about 1661, comes somewhere between. 
It is the last word in the painting of old age. 

“The Painter’s own Portrait” (No. 221, at the National 
Gallery) is painted like the “Old Man,” but such a revelation 
of a man’s soul has never been seen before or since. To look at 
it seems almost sacrilegious; that faded countenance, those 
tired penetrating eyes with their melancholy wisdom, make up, 
it seems, the sum of human suffering, sorrow, and experience. 

There are no more fine clothes; no more rich furs and silken 
materials; no more jewels, only an old turban cap and the 
workaday garments of the old master. He had long since 



THE LAST PHASE : BANKRUPTCY & DEATH 85 


ceased to care for such things—for appearance and for super¬ 
ficial decoration. He had worked out to bare essentials. 
Baldinucci has recorded that when he was painting he had 
acquired the habit of wiping his brushes on the back of 
his clothes. Such was the old painter in 1659, the approximate 
date of the portrait. 

When these pictures were painted he had no settled home; 
no definite abode; no certain studio. In 1661 he ceased to 
etch; his eyesight was failing, and etching was difficult to 
manage without a regular place for his apparatus. His last 
plate is “The Woman with the Arrow,” the most atmospheric 
of all his etchings, and the most satisfactory of his etched nudes, 
although in it his grasp of form is failing a little. But he was 
fortunate in having a good model in the faithful Hendrickje, 
who was always with him and shared his fortunes. 

The interesting suggestion that Rembrandt visited England 
in 1661-2 and stayed for some time in Hull is, apparently, 
without foundation. It is more likely that he had found his 
new home on the Rozengracht or Quay of Roses as early as 
the winter of 1661. The years 1661 and 1662 saw the produc¬ 
tion of a large number of pictures, including two important 
groups, the “Syndics” and “Claudius Civilis,” and it is probable 
that he was in some settled abode when he undertook them. 
The smaller pictures included the paintings of Titus as the 
angel in the St. Matthew picture, and Hendrickje and the 
young Cornelia in “Venus and Love,” both in the Louvre. 

A certain amount of peace and happiness returned to Rem¬ 
brandt. In December of 1660, Hendrickje and Titus entered 
into partnership for the purpose of dealing in pictures, prints, 



86 


REMBRANDT VAN RYN 


copper-plates, and wood-cuts, with impressions therefrom, 
objects of vertu and all things relating thereto. Rembrandt 
was to assist them both with his advice. In return they advanced 
him 1750 florins, to be repaid by Rembrandt as soon as he was 
in a position to do so. This kindly arrangement was designed, 
of course, to assist the old master, and the deed was so drawn 
up that no responsibility could fall on him in the event of failure. 

It is difficult to realize that Rembrandt should have been in 
money difficulties at this time, for he was painting pictures 
which would now fetch many thousands of pounds. 

For the Town Hall, now the Palace, at Amsterdam he 
painted his largest and most remarkable (though not his finest) 
picture, the “Conspiracy of Claudius Civilis,” which was 
finished in 1662. The commission for this had originally been 
given to Govert Flinck, but Flinck died in February, 1660, and 
someone remembered his master’s existence. It may have 
been Dr. Tulp, the hero of the early “Anatomy Lesson,” who 
held an important position in the City Council at that time. 
The picture was painted to fill a lunette in the gallery at the 
Town Hall, but it did not win favour with the authorities, who 
did not scruple to criticize the work of the unpopular master. 
After being in position for a short time, it was taken down and 
returned to Rembrandt’s studio. He may not even have been 
paid for it. Some time later the canvas was cut down. 
The central portion, which measures about seven feet by ten, 
alone survives. 

It is now in the National Museum at Stockholm. It represents 
the chieftain Claudius Civilis (who flourished in the years 69 
and 70), swearing-in his Batavians to resist their common foe, 




THE LAST PHASE : BANKRUPTCY & DEATH 87 


the Romans. The figures are grouped around a table on which 
lights are burning, the lights being hidden by the nearer figures. 
It was one of those effects of which Rembrandt was a master. 
It is said to be very splendid and subtle in colour. There are 
about eleven figures in the surviving fragment, and each one is 
a remarkable portrait—a masterpiece which the civic authorities 
despised and rejected. 

This brings us to the “Syndics of the Cloth-Merchants’ 
Guild,” which bears two signatures and two dates, 1661 and 
1662. This picture is, in some ways, Rembrandt’s greatest work. 
It would be interesting to know what sum he was paid for it, 
but, unfortunately, there is no information on that point. 

Nor do we know who was responsible for giving Rembrandt 
the commission for the picture, this ray of sunlight in the dark 
days of his old age; who gave him this opportunity to present to 
humanity this great masterpiece, which marked and glorified 
the last ten years of his life, and signalized in so striking a way 
the zenith of his development. It so easily might not have 
happened. It is a picture for all time, of universal interest. 
There is really no time in art; no truly great picture can ever 
be old-fashioned. 

And of what was it composed ? Of six very prosaic men in 
ugly costumes, seated around a table covered with red cloth 
against a background of warm wooden panelling—at a business 
meeting. No painter after it can complain that his surroundings 
are too hideous to inspire a work of art. It is not easy; but, then, 
art never is easy. It is the artist who creates the beauty. Art 
springs from artistic feeling; unless you have the root, you 
cannot get the flower. To the facts of life the artist is indifferent; 



88 


REMBRANDT VAN RYN 


it is the effect that concerns him; and effect is a matter of colour, 
of light and shade, of masses and relations. Nothing is so ugly 
that it will not look beautiful under certain effects. Whistler 
has expressed this truth inimitably in the well-known passage 
when he describes how the factories and factory chimneys 
become palaces and campanili in the night. 

This picture has the perfect simplicity of all Rembrandt’s 
late work. In it he has painted simple humanity, and humanity 
is eternally interesting. How effective are these masses of black 
against the warm grey background. Almost the only note of 
colour is in the red tablecloth, which is not only a strong 
dynamic point in the composition, but gives value to the blacks. 
This is the last and greatest of his three famous portrait groups. 
In the early “Anatomy Lesson” he was still groping; each 
figure was painted separately, he had not then achieved that 
subtle relationship between them by which he could weld them 
into one consistent whole. In “The Night Watch” he obtained 
a wonderful dramatic effect; but it was an effect imposed some¬ 
what artificially, and not arising within the subject. He obtained 
it by ignoring the limitations imposed on him, and the condi¬ 
tions expected of the painter of such pictures. But in the 
“Syndics” there is no straining after effect. He is great enough 
now to paint within the limitations imposed. Yet there is 
no record that the picture gave particular satisfaction or that 
it was recognized as a supreme masterpiece. 

Rembrandt had lost reputation through his painting of “The 
Night Watch,” and the attitude of society and the public was 
then what it has always been to the artist. It gave recognition 
and appreciation to his renown, and not to his art. 



the LAST PHASE : BANKRUPTCY & DEATH 89 


While he painted on familiar and accepted lines, he was 
successful and became the fashion; the moment he expressed 
an originality that was beyond it, the public dropped him. 
He offered it food for thought, and that is notoriously 
indigestible. 

The picture of “The Syndics’’ now hangs in the Rijks 
Museum at Amsterdam. 

About the year 1654, Rembrandt painted the portrait of his 
friend Jan Six. This painting was different in many ways from 
his other portraits. It is painted with a freedom of touch, an 
ease and lightness of handling, which one associates more with 
Frans Hals than with Rembrandt. But it is much more solid 
and more artistic than any work of Hals. In Hals the light 
touch was habitual; sometimes monotonous; it had nothing of 
the newness that marked its use in the Six portrait. In Rem¬ 
brandt it expressed the freedom of spirit and perhaps a certain 
joyousness that the painter felt in the presence of his old friend. 

It must have been shortly after this that the two quarrelled. 
In 1653 we know that the painter borrowed 1000 florins from 
him, a debt which Six transferred to a third party, possibly 
after the portrait had been painted. In any case, their friend- 
• ship ceased. Six married, about this time, the daughter of the 
surgeon Nicholaes Tulp, of the “Anatomy Lesson” fame. This 
alliance might, one would imagine, have strengthened the 
friendship with Rembrandt; but in 1656 the bride’s portrait 
was painted, and the commission was given, not to Rembrandt, 
but to his pupil, Govert Flinck. This slight to an old friend 
was unmistakable evidence that their relationship was at an end. 

One reason for Rembrandt’s continued money difficulties 



9 o 


REMBRANDT VAN RYN 


even in his humbler and less expensive way of life, and with 
the amiable arrangement made by Hendrickje and Titus to 
assist him, was the fact that his existing creditors had a lien on 
all he might make by his art. In spite of all this, the old painter 
might have lived happily and in moderate comfort in his modest 
house on the Quay of Roses, but Hendrickje fell ill and died in 
1663. This was an irreparable blow to the old painter, and left 
a blank which nothing could fill. His sense of loneliness 
increased when Titus married in 1668. He had a daughter, 
born in the following year, named Titia, and six months later 
Titus himself, who had always been delicate and frequently 
ailing, lay on his death-bed. His life had been simple and 
unassuming in his affection for Hendrickje and his devotion 
to his father. 

Thus was Rembrandt bereft of the last personal ties which 
bound him to life. Having lost the two beings whose love had 
been his support and consolation in the last bitter years, 
nothing remained to him. There were now, as his companions, 
only Titus’s widow (Magdalena van Loo), the baby Titia, and 
the little Cornelia, who was fifteen years old; and two of 
these could be but little consolation to the old man. 

Some time during these last years he had one pupil whose 
companionship must have been a source of interest and comfort. 
This was the young painter Aart de Gelder (born in 1645), 
who came to him from the studio of Samuel van Hoogstraeten, 
a former pupil. There is something touching in the thought of 
the presence of this solitary pupil in the studio of the wise old 
master who had once had so many. 

In spite of the deepening sorrow of his life, Rembrandt still 



THE LAST PHASE : BANKRUPTCY & DEATH 91 


painted, and with no perceptible diminution of power; he did 
not lay aside his brush until his death. The pictures of his last 
years have a glory of colour which is unmatched in any of his 
earlier work. It is as though he put into his art the colour 
which had gone out of his life. 

The noble and truly pathetic picture of “The Return of the 
Prodigal,” at Petrograd, was painted in the last year of his life. 
For absolute beauty of feeling and sheer expression of soul, the 
two figures of the prodigal son and the old father have never 
been surpassed. The originality of the pose of the prodigal, 
who kneels with his back to the spectator and his head resting 
against his father’s body, is very remarkable. In the work of 
any other painter it would be called daring—an absurd epithet 
to apply to Rembrandt. The exquisite compassion of the old 
father, who bends forward in forgiveness, his hands on the 
shoulders of his kneeling son, is one of the sublimest things in 
the history of art. 

It seems to sum up and fittingly to close Rembrandt’s 
own spiritual life. The picture, as a whole, is a curious 
composition; the essence of the picture is the group of the 
father and son, and the design would be vastly improved if 
the rest of it were removed. The other standing figures are 
aloof and remote, with a strange air of detachment. Perhaps 
they are meant as a contrast; possibly they represent the attitude 
of the world, regarding with cold indifference, a beautiful act. 

Another late picture of a very different kind is the large 
painting of a family group, at Brunswick. This is an exceed¬ 
ingly happy picture. It represents a father and mother with 
their three children. It is a robust and vigorous painting, 



92 


REMBRANDT VAN RYN 


glowing with positive colour, which shows that the master’s 
hand had lost none of its cunning. 

The end of Rembrandt’s life was drawing near. Those 
whom he loved were dead. He had completed a succession of 
masterpieces which only the greatest masters have rivalled. 
Through a lifetime of ceaseless endeavour, of sorrow and 
suffering, and unremitting purpose, he had reached the summit 
of artistic expression, in which the soul poured forth its strength 
and its sweetness in pictures of imperishable beauty. 

Early in this last year of his life he had attended, as the 
child’s guardian, the baptism of Titia. It was almost his last 
act, for seven months later, on October 4, he died. No one 
among his contemporaries appears to have mentioned his 
death. He died forgotten, in the deepest poverty, possessing 
only his clothes and his painting materials. In some ways, 
despite the pathos of it, this seems a fitting end. He achieved 
immortal fame by his art, and when life ceased he possessed 
nothing but the instruments by which he had expounded 
that art. 

Rembrandt van Ryn was buried in the Westerkerk of 
Amsterdam, on October 8, 1669. 




INDEX 


“ A Female Portrait ” 

“ A Jewish Rabbi ” .. 

“ A Man with a Cap ” 

“ Abraham Sacrificing Isaac ” 
Apprenticeship 


PAGE 

.. 70 

.. 79 

•• 73 
.. 9 

.. 20 


Bankrupt .. .. .. 41, 

“ Bathsheba ” 

Berchem, Nicholaes (portrait) 
Betrothal to Saskia Uylenburch 
“ Betrothed Jewess ” 

Birth 

Bonus, Dr. Ephraim (portrait) 

Buckingham Palace, Rembrandt’s 
pictures in .. .. 60, 

Buying at auction .. 


76 
70 
67 

37 

37 

13 

67 

77 

40 , 


“ Christ appearing to Mary Mag¬ 
dalen ” 

“ Christ before Pilate ” 

“ Christ disputing with the Doctors ” 


60 

77 


29, 32 

“ Christ taken down from the Cross ” 58 

“ Christ with the Sick around Him ” 39 

Cocq, Frans Banning .. 50, 54 

Collecting, passion for .. 40, 41 

“ Conspiracy of Claudius Civilis” 

85, 86, 87 

Czartoryski .. .. .. .. 60 


“ David Playing the Harp Before 
Saul ” .. .. .. 9,78 

Death and funeral .. .. .. 92 

Death of his mistress, Hendrickje 
Stoffels .. .. .. .. 90 


PAGE 

Death of his wife .. .. 57, 71 

“ Diana Bathing ” .. .. 34, 78 

Dircks, Geertgen, nurse of Rem¬ 
brandt’s son Titus .. .. 68 

Dou, Gerard, pupil of Rembrandt.. 28 

Dulwich Gallery, a picture of Rem¬ 
brandt’s in .. .. .. 69 

Etchings .28, 29, 31 

Family group, painting of a .. 91 

Father .13 

(Portraits) .17 

“ Flora ” 37 

Francen, Abraham (portrait) .. 77 


Glasgow Art Gallery, Rembrandt’s 
pictures in .. .. .. .. 73 

Haaring, Jacob (portrait) .. .. 77 

Haaring, Thomas (portrait) .. 77 

Holland, civic guards of .. .. 49 

“ Hundred Florin Plate ” .. .. 39 


“ Jacob blessing the Children of 
Joseph ” .. .. .. 77 

“ Joseph and Potiphar’s Wife ” .. 74 

“ Judas bringing back the Price of 
his Betrayal ” .. .. .. 32 

“ Landscape with a Ruin on a Hill” 60,65 

Lastman, Pieter, Rembrandt and 20, 21 

Leaves Amsterdam .. .. .. 58 

“ Lesson in Anatomy by Doctor 
Deyman ” .. .. .. 77, 88 

Leyden University and professors 13 


93 







INDEX 


<< 


PAGE 

Lievens, Jan .. .. .. 22, 23 

Lot and his Daughters ” .. .. 23 

Louvre, the, Rembrandt’s pictures 
at .. <. .. 23» 70 1 74» 85 

Lutma, Jan (portrait) .. .. 77 


“ Man in Armour ” .. 
Marriage 


• * 73 

10,37 

Money difficulties 48, 56, 69, 74, 75, 90 
Mother .. .. .. .. 17 


National Gallery, the, Rembrandt’s 
pictures in 45, 47, 58, 70, 73, 77, 

78, 79, 83, 84 


(< 


Omval 


» 


.. 66 


“ Portrait of a Girl ” 
“ Portrait of a Man ” 


“ Portrait of a Burgomaster ” 79, 83, 84 

• • • • 

• * •• 73 

“ Portrait of a Woman ” .. .. 78 

“ Portrait of an Old Lady in Black, 
with White Cap and Ruff” .. 35 

“ Portrait of an Old Man ” 79, 83, 84 

“ Reconciliation of David and 
Absalom ” .. .58 

Rembrandt (portraits) .. 32, 45, 84 


PAGE 

“ Still Life ”.28 

Stoffels, Hendrickje, mistress of 
Rembrandt .. 68, 69,70,72 

Death .. .. .. .. 89 

(Portrait) .. .. .. 70 

Student days.. .. .. 19 et seq. 

Studies in Amsterdam .. .. 20 

Sued for breach of promise .. 68 

“ Susannah at the Bath ” .. .. 37 

“ Susannah and the Elders ” 58, 67 

Swanenburch, Jacob van, Rembrandt 
as pupil .. .. .. .. 19 

“ The Adoration of the Magi ” .. 77 

“ The Adoration of the Shepherds ” 47, 58 
The Anatomy Lesson ” .. 36, 48, 49 

The Arming of the Guard ” (see 
“ The Night Watch ”) 

“ The Banker ” .. .. .. 31 

“ The Baptism of the Eunuch ” .. 23 

.. 67 




<< 


“ The Concord of the State ” 

“ The Denial of St. Peter ” 

The Good Samaritan ” .. 

The Holy Family ” 

The Marriage of Jason and Creusa ” 59 
“ The Mill ”. 60, 66 


iC 


<< 


n 


•• 77 

•• 74 

.. 69 


Rembrandt Museum, Amsterdam .. 

4 i 

“ The Night Watch ” 10, n, 36, 46, 

Removes to Amsterdam 

30 

4 8 . 49 . 5 6 > 7 i. 



“ The Painter’s own Portrait ” 

“ Saint Anastasius ” 

32 

“ The Painter’s Study ” 

“ St. Matthew ” 

00 

“ The Portrait of an Old Lady ” .. 

“ St. Paul in Prison ” 

31 

“ The Presentation in the Temple ” 29, 

“ Samson’s Wedding Feast ” 

37 

“ The Rape of Europa ” 

Schooldays .. 

18 

“ The Rape of Proserpine ” 

“ Simeon in the Temple ” .. 

45 

“ The Return of the Prodigal ” 

Six, Jan (portrait) .. .. 59, 70, 

89 

“ The Sacrifice of Manoah ” 

“ Six’s Bridge ” . 

66 

“ The Shell ” . 


73 


59 

59 


94 




INDEX 


PAGE 

“ The Supper at Emmaus ” 9, 67 

“The Syndics of the Cloth Mer¬ 
chants’ Guild ” .. 12, 85, 87, 88, 89 

“ The Three Trees ” .. .. 66 

“ The Woman Bathing ” .. 70, 78 

“ The Woman taken in Adultery ” 

45 . 46 ,58 

“ The Woman with the Arrow ” .. 85 

Tholinx, Arnold (portrait) .. .. 76 

Titus (son of Rembrandt), Death .. 90 

(Portraits) .74 

Uylenburch, Hendrick van 32, 33 
Uylenburch, Jan Sylvius (portrait) 37 

Uylenburch, Saskia, death .. 57, 71 

marries Rembrandt .. .. 37 

(Portraits) .. .. 37, 3 8 » 57 


PAGE 

van der Vliet, J. J. .. .. ..29 

van Leyden, Lucas .. .. .. 19 

van Ryn, Adriaen Harmensz (brother) 18 
(Portrait) .. .. • • 73 

van Ryn, Cornelia (mother), (portrait) 17 
van Ryn, Harmen Gerritsz (father) 13, 17 
(Portraits) .. .. .. 17 

van Ryn, Lysbeth (sister) .. .. 17 

“ Vanitas ” .. .. .. .. 28 

“ Venus and Love . .. 70, 85 

Wallace Collection, the, a Rem¬ 
brandt in .. .. .. .. 74 

“Woman with Pearls” .. .. 70 

Worp, Dr. J. A. .. .. .*23 

“ Young Girl at a Window ” .. 69 


THE SUN ENGRAVING CO., LTD., LONDON AND WATFORD 











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4 . 


OCT 1958 





















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